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titie 


Essence of Religion. 


God the Image of Man. Man’s Dependence upon 
Nature the last and only Source of Religion. 


. * * j * 4 

LUDWIG 5 ' FEUERBACH, 

^Author of ** The Essence of Christianity,” &c., <5cc. 


TRANSLATED BY 

^.LE^C^ISrnDEPl LOOS, -A_ HVC* 





New York : j 

ASA BUTTS CO, 

No. 3 6 DEY STREET 


1873 . 






! 

. IV-rEs 

iZld 


['*■* UBIUarl 

or CONOKEMi 

L**«U»flw>»l 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 
ASA K. BUTTS, 

in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 


New York: 

McBride, Marrat & Co., Printers, 
86 Dej Street, 





LJDWIG FEUERBACH, 

A BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 

--♦ ►—-. 


In submitting to the American public the subsequent 
argument for the natural origin of religion, by a thinker 
whose name has, during the last year, received a well-de¬ 
served but long withheld prominence on this side of the 
Atlantic, by the eloquence of one of his noblest peers in 
the realm of thought, as well as by the lamentable news 
of his recent death: we consider it not altogether su¬ 
pererogatory to introduce it by a brief sketch of the 
author’s life, especially for the sake of assigning to the 
following paragraphs their true place in his life work. 

Ludwig Feuerbach was the fourth of the five sons of the 
celebrated German criminalist Anselm von Feuerbach 
born July 28th 1804, at Landshut in Bavaria. The vi¬ 
cissitudes of his simple life do not present any sensation¬ 
al features, and neither his position in life, nor his incli¬ 
nation tended to bring him prominently before the pub¬ 
lic. His life was eminently a life of thought, and his 
writings are his real biography. 

What Feuerbach was at any time of his life, he was 
with his whole soul. In his youth, as a pupil of the Gym¬ 
nasium at Auspach, he was a pious Christian—pious with 
all the energy of his character. In the fervor of his piety, 
he devoted himself from free choice to the study of the¬ 
ology at the University of Heidelberg, but without find¬ 
ing there any satisfactory nourishment for the restless 
cravings of his aspiring mind. He therefore left Heidel- 






11 


LUDWIG- FEUERBACH. 


berg in 1824 for Berlin, whence he wrote to his father as 
follows : “ I have abandoned theology, not however wan¬ 
tonly or recklessly or from dislike, but because it does 
not satisfy me, because it does not give me what I indis¬ 
pensably need. I want to £ prcss Nature to my heart, liom 
whose depth the cowardly theologian shrinks back; I 
want to embrace man, but man in his entirety. Feuer¬ 
bach could not resist the power with which Hegel then 
attracted the young students ; but he possessed too inde¬ 
pendent a mind to swear upon the master’s word, and 
gradually, not only emancipated himself from Hegel’s 
philosophy but determined to altogether throw off spec¬ 
ulative philosophy and to exclusively devote himself to the 
only true science, that of Nature. But the death of 
King Max the First of Bavaria, whose liberal patronage 
had enabled Anselm von Feuerbach to give to each of his 
five talented sons a liberal education, frustrated tins inten¬ 
tion, and prevented Ludwig Feuerbach from continuing 
his studies. He accordingly settled in 1828 as a private 
tutor at the University of Erlangen and lectured on 
Logic and Metaphysics, but he soon realized that the 
prevailing scholasticism of a royal university was not a 
congenial atmosphere for his independent mind, and 
throwing up all official connection with licensed institu¬ 
tions and systems, he retired into the rural solitude of 
Bruckberg, a small village near Auspach,where Nature|and 
Science absorbed all the fervor of his enthusiasm and in¬ 
spired him, during a residence of 25 years, with the most im¬ 
portant of his literary creations—a residence that was in- ; 
terrupted only by a short visit at Heidelberg in 1848, - 
whither he had been invited by the student youth to give 
a course of lectures before a promiscuous audience on j 
“ The Essence of Religion.” The feelings with which j 
he hailed this self-emancipation from the thraldom of of- 
flee and scholastic influences can best be realized from the 
words in which he gave vent to his exultation, when in 
1838 he had been united in blissful wedlock to the sister- 
in-law of the friend who had secured for him the asylum 
at Bruckberg : “ Now X can do homage to my genius; now 



LUDWIG FEUERBACH, 


iii 


I can devote myself independently, freely, regardlessly 
to the development of my own being !” 

Among his writings which have been published in a 
uniform edition comprising ten volumes, the following 
desire especially to be mentioned: Thoughts on Death and 
Immortality, (1830); History of Modern Philosophy 
from Bacon of Verulam to Spinoza, (1833); Representa¬ 
tion, Devehipment and Criticism of Leibnitz’s Philosophy, 
(1837); Pierre Bayle, (1838); Essence of Christianity, 
(1841, second edition 1843, third edition 1848—trans¬ 
lated by Marion Evans); Essence of Religion, (1845). 
This last named work which is here for the first time 
presented to the American public in translation, forms 
the principal basis for the thirty lectures on “ The 
Essence of Religion,” which Ludwig Feuerbach, as before 
stated, held in the winter of 1848-1849 at Heidelberg 
before a promiscuous audience, and in which he endeavor¬ 
ed to fill a gap left in his “Essence of Christianity,” by 
enlarging the argument of the latter, according to which 
“ all theology is anthropology ” by the addition of “ and 
physiology,” so that his doctrine and conception of religion 
is embraced in the two words Nature and Man. The 
last principal work of Ludwig Feuerbach is “Theogony 
according to the sources of Classic, Hebrew and Christian 
antiquity,” which forms the 9th volume of his works; 
the 10th volume (1866) consisting of a promiscuous col¬ 
lection of essays on “ Deity, liberty and immortality from 
the stand-point of anthropology.” 

Afterwards Feuerbach transferred his residence from 
Bruckberg to Rechenberg near Nuremberg, where he 
lived exclusively to his family and a small circle of inti¬ 
mate friends. Solely devoted as he had been to the ser¬ 
vice of science, he had not hoarded up any riches and in 
consequence suffered toward the evening of his life from 
severe and annoying deprivations. A due sense of grat¬ 
itude on the part of his contemporaries in Europe and 
America, secured the success of a national subscription, 
intended to relieve him and his family from want and 
cares for the rest of his life. But his health, undermined 



IV 


LUDWIG FEUERBACH. 


by severe mental labor and deprivation, failed more and 
more rapidly and disabled him even from fully realizing 
the enjoyment of a nation’s grateful recognitions, when 
a repeated stroke of apoplexy overshadowed his existence 
with the gloom of partial unconsciousness, until on the 
12th of Sept., 1872, he died at Hechenberg. 

In trying to briefly point out, in conclusion, the sub¬ 
stance of Ludwig Feuerbach’s writings in general and 
of the subsequent argument in particular, we do not 
know how to do this better or more strikingly, than in 
his own words in which he speaks of his life-work as 
follows: 

“ My business was, and above everything is, to illu¬ 
mine the dark regions of religion with the torch of 
reason, that man at last may no longer be a sport to 
the hostile powers that hitherto- and now avail them¬ 
selves of the mystery of religion to oppress man¬ 
kind. My aim has been to prove that the powers 
before which man crouches are creatures of his own 
limited, ignorant, uncultured, and timorous mind, to 
prove that in special the being whom man sets 
over against himself as a separate supernatural existence 
is his own being. The purpose of my writing is to make 
men <m£/4n?pologians instead of ^Aeologians ; man-lovers 
instead of G-od-lovers ; students of this world instead of 
candidates of the next; self-reliant citizens of the eartq; 
instead of subservient and wily ministers of a celestial 
and terrestrial monarchy. My object is therefore any¬ 
thing but negative, destructive, it is positive : I deny in 
order to affirm. I deny the illusions of theology and re¬ 
ligion that I may affirm the substantial being of man.!’ 




THE 


ESSENCE OF RELIGION, 

GOD THE IMAGE OF MAN. 

MAN’S DEPENDENCE UPON NATURE THE LAST AND ONLY 
SOURCE OF RELIGION. 


[The following treatise forms the basis and substance 
of the author’s larger work, published under the same 
title, as a complement to his previous: “Essence of 
Christianity” (translated into English by Marion Evans, 
the translator of Strauss’ “Life of Jesus.” It will re¬ 
commend itself to the unbiased reader as by far the most 
striking and powerful argument for the human origin of 
religion in general, and Christianity in particular, before 
which all claims and pretensions of dogmatism sink into 
naught.—Translator.] 

§ 1. That being which is different from and inde¬ 
pendent of man, or, which is the same thing, of God, as 
represented in the “ Essence of Christianity,”—the being 
without human nature, without human qualities and 
without human individuality is in reality nothing but 
J¥ature .( 2 ) 

§ 2. The feeling of dependence in man is the source 
of religion; but the object of this dependence, viz., that 






2 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


upon which, man is and feels himself dependent, is orig¬ 
inally nothing but Nature. Nature is the first original 
object offreligion, as is sufficiently proved by the history 
of all religions and nations. 

§ 3. The assertion that religion is innate with and 
natural to man, is false, if religion is identified with 
Theism ; but it is perfectly true, if religion is considered 
to be nothing but that feeling of dependence by which 
man is more or less conscious that he does not and can¬ 
not exist without another being, different from himself, 
and that his existence does not originate in himself. 
Religion, thus understood, is as essential to man as light. 
to the eye, as air to the lungs, as food to the stomach. 
Religion is the manifestation of man’s conception of him¬ 
self. 'But above all man is a being who does not exist 
without light, without air, without water, without earth, 
without food,—he is, in short, a being dependent on Na¬ 
ture. This dependence in the animal, and in man as far 
as he moves within the sphere of the brute, is only an un¬ 
conscious and unreflected one; but by its elevation into 
consciousness and imagination, by its consideration and 
profession, it becomes religion. Thus all life depends 
on the change of seasons; but man alone celebrates this ; 
change by dramatic representations and festival acts. 
But such festivals, which imply and represent nothing | 
but the change of the seasons, or of the phases of the ] 
moon, are the oldest, the first, and the real confessions of 
human religion. 

§ 4. Man, as well as any individual nation or tribe 
considered in its particularity, does not depend on nature 
or earth in general, but on a particular locality—not on 
water generally, but on some particular water, stream or 
fountain. Thus the Egyptian is no Egyptian out of 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


3 


Egypt; the Indian is no Indian out of India. For this 
very reason those ancient nations which were so firmly 
attached to their native soil* and not yet attained to the 
conception of their true nature as members of mankind, 
but which clung to their individuality and particularity 
as nations and tribes, were fully justified in worshiping 
the mountains, trees, animals, rivers and fountains of 
their respective countries as divine beings; for their 
whole individuality and existence were exclusively 
based upon the particularity of their country and its 
nature—iust as he who recognizes the universe as his 
home, and himself as a part of it, transfers the universal 
character of his being into his conception of God. 

§ 5. It is a fantastic notion that man should have 
been enabled only by “ Providence,” through the assist¬ 
ance of “superhuman” beings, such as Gods, Spirits, 
Genii and Angels, to elevate himself above the state of 
the animal. Of course man has become what he is not 
through himself alone; he needed for this the assistance 
of other beings. But these were no supernatural creat¬ 
ures of imagination, but real, natural beings—no beings 
standing above but below himself, for in general every 
thing that aids man in his conscious and voluntary actions, 
commonly and pre-eminently called human, every good 
gift and talent, does not come from above, but from 
below; not from on high, but from the very depths of 
Nature. Such assistant beings, such tutelary genii of 
man, are especially the animals. Only through them 
man raised himself above them; only by their protection 
and assistance, the seed of human perfection could grow. 
Thus we read in the book of Zendavesta, and even in 
its very oldest and most genuine part, Yendidad: 
“ Through the intellect of the dog is the world upheld. 





4 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


If lie did not protect the world, thieves and wolves would 
rob all property.” This importance of the animals to 
man, particularly in times of incipient civilization, fully 
justifies the religious adoration with which they are 
looked upon. The animals were necessary and indis¬ 
pensable to man ; on them his human existence depended 
—but on what his life and existence depends, that is his 
God. If the Christian no longer adores Nature as God, 
it is only because in his belief his existence does not 
depend on Nature, but on the will of a being different 
from Nature; but still he considers and adores this being 
as a divine, i. e. supreme being, only because he deems 
it to be the author and preserver of his existence and life. 
Thus the worship of God depends only on the self-ad- 
oration of man, and is nothing but the manifestation of 
the latter; for suppose I should despise myself and my 
life—and man originally and normally does not make 
any distinction between himself and his life—how should 
I praise and worship that upon which such pitiful and 
contemptible life depends ? The value which I con¬ 
sciously attribute to the source of life reflects therefore 
only the value which I unconsciously attribute to life 
and myself. The higher therefore the value of life, the 
higher also the value and dignity of those who give life, 
viz. of the Gods. How could the Gods possibly be 
resplendent in gold and silver, unless man knew the 
value and the use of gold and silver ? What a differ¬ 
ence between the fullness and love of life among the 
Greeks, and the desolation and contempt of life among 
the Indians—but at the same time what a difference be¬ 
tween the Greek and Indian mythology, between the Olym¬ 
pian father of the Gods and of man and the huge Indian 
opossum or the rattlesnake—the ancestor of the Indians ! 


M 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


5 


§ 6. The Christian enjoys life just as much as the 
Heathen, but he sends his thankofferings for the enjoy¬ 
ments of life upward to the father in Heaven: he accuses 
the Heathen of idolatry for the very reason that they 
confine their adoration to the creature and do not rise to 
the first cause as the only true cause of all benefits. But 
do I owe my existence to Adam, the first man ? Do I 
revere him as my parent ? Why shall I not stop at the 
creature ? Am I myself not a creature ? Is not the 
very nearest cause which is equally defined and individ¬ 
ual with myself, the last cause for me, who myself am 
not from afar, as I myself am a defined and individual 
being? Does not my individuality, inseparable and 
undistinguishable as it is from myself and my existence, 
depend on the individuality of my parents ? Do I not, 
if I go further back, at last lose all traces of my existence? 
Is there not a necessary limit to my thus going back in 
search of the first cause ? Is not the beginning of my ex¬ 
istence absolutely individual ? Am I begotten and con¬ 
ceived in the same year, in the same hour, with the same 
disposition, in short under the same internal and exter¬ 
nal conditions as my brother? Is not therefore my 
origin just as individually my own as my life without 
contradiction is my own life? Shall I therefore extend 
my filial love and veneration back to Adam ? Ho, I am 
fully entitled to stop with my religious reverence at those 
things which are nearest to me, viz., my parents, as the 
cause of my existence. 

§ 7. The uninterrupted series of the finite causes or 
objects, so-called, which w T as defined by the Atheists of 
old as an infinite and by the Theists as a finite one, exists 
only in the thoughts and the imagination of man, like 
time, in which one moment follows another without 




6 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


interruption or distinction. In reality the tedious mon¬ 
otony of this causal series is interrupted and destroyed 
by the difference and individuality of the objects, which 
individuality causes each by itself to appear new, inde¬ 
pendent, single, final and * absolute. Certainly water, 
which in the conception of natural religion is a divine 
being, is on the one hand a compound, depending on 
hydrogen and oxygen, but at the same time it is some¬ 
thing new, to be compared to itself only, and original, 
wherein the qualities of its two constituent elements, as 
such, have disappeared and are destroyed. Certainly 
the moonlight, which the Heathen, in his religious sim¬ 
plicity, adored as an independent light, is derived from 
the immediate light of the sun, but at the same time, dif¬ 
ferent from the latter, the peculiar light of the moon, 
changed and modified by the moon’s resistance, and 
therefore a light which could not exist without the moon, 
and whose particularity has its source only in her. 
Certainly the dog, whom the Persian addresses in his 
prayers as a beneficial and therefore divine being on ac¬ 
count of his watchfulness, his readiness to oblige and his 
faithfulness, is a creature of Nature, which is not what 
he is through himself; but still it is only the dog himself, 
this particular and no other being, which possesses those 
qualities that call for my veneration. Shall I now in 
recognition of these qualities look up to the first and 
general cause, and turn my back on the dog % But the 
general cause is without distinction just as much the 
cause of the friendly dog as of the hostile wolf, whose 
existence I am obliged to destroy, in spite of the general 
cause, if I will sustain the better right of my own 
existence. 

§ 8. The Divine Being which is revealed ip Nature, 





THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


7 


is nothing but Nature herself, revealing and representing 
herself with irresistible power as a Divine Being. The 
ancient Mexicans adored among'their many Gods also a 
God ( or rather a Goddess ) of the salt. This God of the 
salt may reveal to us in a striking exemplification the 
God of Nature in general. The salt ( rock-salt ) repre¬ 
sents in its economical, medicinal and- other effects, the 
usefulness and beneficence of Nature, so highly praised 
by the Theists ; in its effect on the eye, in its colors, its 
brilliancy and transparency, her beauty ; in its crystalline 
structure and form, her harmony and regularity ; in its 
composition of antagonistic elements, the combination of 
the opposite elements of Nature into one whole — a 
combination which by the Theists was always considered 
as an unobjectionable proof for the existence of a ruler 
of Nature, different from her, because in their ignorance 
of Nature they did not know that antagonistic elements 
and things are most apt to attract one another and com¬ 
bine into a new whole. But what now is the God of the 
salt ? That God whose domain, existence, manifestation, 
effects and qualities are contained in the salt ? Nothing 
but the salt itself which appears to man on account of its 
qualities and effects as a divine, i. e., as a beneficent, 
magnificent, praisewQrthy and admirable being. Homer 
expressively calls the salt divine. Thus, as the God of 
the salt is only the impression and expression of the 
deity or divinity of the salt, so also is the God of the 
world or of Nature in general, only the impression and 
expression of Nature’s divinity. 

§ 9. The belief that in Nature another being is mani¬ 
fested, distinct from Nature herself, or that Nature is 
filled and governed by a being different from herself, is 
in reality identical with the belief that spirits, demons, 




8 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


devils &c. manifested themselves through man, at least 
in a certain state, and that they possess him; it is in 
very truth the belief, that Nature is possessed by a 
strange, spiritual being* And indeed Nature, viewed in 
the light of such a belief, is really possessed by a spirit, 
but this spirit is the spirit of man, his imagination, his 
soul, which transfers itself involuntarily into Nature and 
—makes her a symbol and mirror of his being. 

§ 10. Nature is not only the first and original object 
but also the lasting source , the continuous , although 
hidden background of religion. The belief that God, 
even when he is imagined as a supernatural being, differ¬ 
ent from Nature, is an object existing outside of man, 
an objective being, as the philosophers call it; this belief 
has its only source in the fact, that the objective being, 
which really exists outside of man, Viz., the world or Na¬ 
ture, is originally God. The existence of nature is not, 
as Theism imagines, based upon the existence of God 
but vice versa , the existence of God, or rather the belief 
in his existence, is only based upon the existence of Na¬ 
ture. You are obliged to imagine God as an existing 
being, only because you are obliged by Nature herself to 
pre-suppose the existence of Nature as the cause and con¬ 
dition of your existence and consciousness, and the very 
first idea connected with the thought of God is nothing 
but the very idea that he is the existence preceding your 
oym and presupposed to it. Or, the belief that God 
exists absolutely outside of man’s soul and reason, no 
matter whether man exists or not, whether he contem¬ 
plates him or not, whether he desires him or not—this 
belief or rather its object, does not reflect anything to 
your imagination but Nature, whose existence is not 
based upon the existence of man, much less upon the 






ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


9 


action of the human intellect and imagination. If, there¬ 
fore, the theologians, particularly the Rationalists, find 
the honor of God pre-eminently in his having an exist¬ 
ence independent of man’s thoughts, they may consider 
that the honor of such an existence likewise must be at¬ 
tributed to the Gods of blinded Heathenism, to the stars, 
stones and animals, and that in this respect the existence 
of their God does not differ from the existence of the 
Egyptian Apis. 

Those qualities which imply and express the difference 
between the divine being and the human being or at 
least the human individual, are originally and implicitly 
only qualities of Nature. God is the most powerful or 
rather the almighty being, i. e., he can do what man 
is not able to do, what infinitely surpasses his powers, 
and what therefore inspires him with the humiliating 
feeling of his limitedness, weakness and nullity. “ Canst 
thou,” says God to Job, “bind the sweet influences of 
Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion ? Canst thou send 
lightnings, that they may go unto thee and say, here we 
are ? Hast thou given the horse strength ? Does the 
hawk fly by thy wisdom; Hast thou an arm like God, or 
canst thou thunder with a voice like Him?” Ho, that 
man cannot do, with the thunder the human voice can¬ 
not be compared. But what power is manifest in the 
power of the thunder, in the horse’s strength, in the 
flight of the hawk, in the restless course of the Pleiades ? 
The power of Nature. 

God is an eternal being. But in the Bible itself we 
read: “ One generation passeth away and another gener 
ation cometh : but the earth abideth forever.” In the 
books of Zendavesta, sun and moon are expressively 
called “ immortal on account of their duration. And 




10 


ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


a Peruvian Inca said to a Dominican monk, “ You adore 
a God who died on the cross, hut I worship the Sun 
which never dies.” 

God is the all-hind being, “for he maketh the sun to 
rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the 
just and on the unjustbut that being which does not 
distinguish between good and evil, between just and un¬ 
just, which distributes the enjoyments of life not accord¬ 
ing to moral merits ; which in general impresses man as 
a kind being, because its effects, such as for instance the 
refreshing sunlight and rain-water are the sources of the 
most beneficial sensations : that being is Nature. 

God is an all-embracing , universal and unchangeable 
being; but it is also one and the same sun which shines 
for all men and beings on the earth; it is one and the 
same sky which embraces them all; one and the same 
earth which bears them all. “ That there is one God,” 
says Ambrosius, “is proved by common Nature: for 
there is only one world,” “ just as the sun, the sky, the 
moon, the earth and the sea are common to all,” says 
Plutarch, “ although they are differently called by each 
one, so exists also one spirit, who rules the universe, but 
he has different names and is worshipped in different 
ways.” 

God “ dwelleth not in temples made with hands,” but 
Nature neither. Who can enclose the light, the sky, the 
sea, within human limits? The ancient Persians and 
Germans worshipped only Nature, but they had no tem¬ 
ples. The worshipper of Nature finds the artificial, well- 
measured halls of a temple or of a church too narrow, 
too sultry; he feels at his ease only under the lofty, 
boundless sky which appears tQ the contemplation of his 
senses. 



ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


11 


God is that being which cannot be defined with human 
measure, a great, immeasurable, infinite being; but he 
is such a being only because his work, the universe, is 
great, immeasurable and infinite, or at least appears to 
be so. The work praises its master: the magnificence of 
the creator has its origin only in the magnificence of his 
product. “ How great is the sun, but how much greater 
is he who made it ?” 

God is a sup er terrestrial, superhuman, supreme 
being, but even this supreme being is in its origin and 
basis nothing but the highest being in space, optically 
considered: the sky with its brilliant phenomena. All 
religions of some imagination transfer their Gods into 
the region of the clouds, into the ether of the sun, moon 
and stars: all Gods are lost at last in the blue vapor 
of heaven . Even the spiritual God of Christianity has. 
his seat, his basis above in heaven. 

God is a mysterious, inconceivable being, but only 
because Nature is to man, especially to religious man, a 
mysterious inconceivable being. “ Dost thou know,” 
says God to Job, “ the balancings of the clouds ? Hast 
thou entered into the springs of the sea ? Hast thou 
perceived the breadth of the earth ? Hast thou seen the 
treasures of the hail ?” 

Finally, God is that being which is independent of the 
human will, unmoved by human wants and* passions, 
always equal to himself, ruling according to unchange¬ 
able laws, establishing his institutions unchangeable for 
all time. But this being again is nothing but Nature, 
which remains the same in all changes, never exhibiting 
the vacillations of an arbitrary, willful ruler, but subject 
in all her manifestations to unalterable laws: inexorable, 
regardless Nature. ( 3 ) 




12 


ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


§ 12. Although God, as the author of Nature, is 
imagined and represented as a being different from 
Nature, still what is implied and expressed by this being, 
its real contents , is nothing but Nature. “Ye shall 
know them by their fruits,” we read in the Bible, and 
the apostle Paul points expressively to the world as to 
the work wherein God’s existence and being can be un¬ 
derstood, for what one produces, that contains his being 
and shows what he is able to do. What we have in 
Nature, that we have in God, only imagined as the 
author or cause of Nature —therefore no moral and 
spiritual, but only a natural, physical being. A worship 
founded only upon God as the author of Nature, without 
attributing to him any other qualities, derived from man, 
and without imagining him at the same time as a poli¬ 
tical and moral, i. e. human lawgiver—such worship 
w T ould be a mere worship of Nature. It is true that the 
author of Nature is thought to be endowed with intellect 
and will; but what his will desires, what his intellect 
thinks, is just that which requires no will nor intellect, 
but only mechanical, physical, chemical, vegetable and 
animal forces and impulses. 

§ 13. As little as the formation of the child in the 
womb, the pulsations of the heart, digestion and other 
organic functions are effects of the intellect and will, so 
little is Nature in general the effect or production of a 
spiritual being, i. e. of a being that wills and knows or 
thinks. If Nature was originally a product of the mind, 
and therefore a manifestation of mind, then also the 
natural phenomena of the present time would be spiritual 
effects and manifestations. A supernatural commence¬ 
ment necessarily requires a supernatural continuation. 
For man thinks intellect and will to be the cause of 





THE ESSENCE OE RELIGION. 


13 


Nature only where the effects defy his own will, and 
surpass his intellect, where he explains things only 
through human analogies and reasons, where he knows 
nothing of the natural causes, and therefore derives also 
the special and present phenomena from God, or—as 
for instance the movements of the stars which he cannot 
understand—from subordinate spirits. But if now-a-days 
the fulcrum of the earth and of the stars is no longer the 
almighty word of God, and the motive of their move¬ 
ment no spiritual or angelic but a mechanical one: then 
the first cause of this movement is also necessarily a 
mechanical, or, in general, a natural one. To derive 
Nature from intellect and will, or in general from the 
mind, is to reckon without the host, is to bring forth the 
saviour of the world from the virgin without the co¬ 
operation of a man , through the Holy Ghost ,—is 
to change water into wine ,—is to appease storms with 
words , to transfer mountains with words , to restore sight 
to the blind with words. What weakness and narrow¬ 
mindedness does it betray to do away with the secondary 
causes of superstition, such as miracles, devils, spirits 
etc., in explaining the phenomena of Nature, but to 
leave untouched the first cause of superstition! 

§ 14 . Several of the ancient ecclesiastical writers as¬ 
sert, that the Son of God is not a product of God’s will, 
but of God’s nature ; that the product of Nature is ear¬ 
lier than the product of the will, and that, therefore, the 
act of begetting, as an act of Nature, precedes the act of 
creation as an act of the will. Thus the acknowledg¬ 
ment of Nature and her omnipotent laws prevails even 
within the sphere of the belief in the supernatural God, 
altl lough in the plainest contradiction of his own will 
and being. The act of begetting is presupposed to the 






14 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


act of the will; the activity of Nature is considered as 
preceding the activity of thought and will. This is per¬ 
fectly true. Nature must necessarily exist before any¬ 
thing exists which distinguishes itself from Nature, and 
which places Nature, as an object of the act of thinking 
and willing, in opposition to itself. The true way of 
philosophy leads from the want of intelligence to intel¬ 
lect ; but the direct way into the madhouse of theology, 
goes from the intellect to the want of intellect. To base 
the mind not upon Nature, but, vice versa, Nature upon 
the mind, is the same as to place the head, not upon the 
abdomen, but the latter upon the former. Every higher 
degree of development presupposes the lower one, not 
vice versa, ( 4 ) for the simple reason, that the higher one 
must have something below it, in order to be the higher 
one. And the higher a being stands and the greater its 
value or dignity is, the more it presupposes. For this 
very reason not the first being, but the latest, the last, 
the most depending, the most needful, the most compli¬ 
cated being is the highest one, just as in the history of 
the earth’s formation, not the oldest and first works, such 
as the slate and granite, but the latest and most recent 
products, such as the basalts and. the dense lavas, are the 
heaviest and weightiest ones. A being which has the 
honor of presupposing nothing, has also the honor of 
being nothing. But it is true that the Christians under¬ 
stand well the a_t of making something out of nothing. 

§ 15. “ All things come from and depend upon God.” 

—so the Christian says in harmony with his godly faith— 
“ but,” he adds immediately with his ungodly intellect, 
“only indirectly .” God is only the first cause after 
which comes the endless host of subordinate Gods, the 
regiment of intermediate causes. But the intermediate 






THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


15 


causes, so-called, are the only real and effective ones, the 
only objective and sensible causes. A God who no 
longer casts down man with the arrows of Apollo, who 
no longer arouses the soul with Jove’s thunder and 
lightning, who no longer threatens the sinner with 
comets and other fiery phenomena, who no longer with 
his own high hand attracts the iron to the loadstone, pro¬ 
duces ebb and tide, and protects the Continent against 
the overbearing power of the waters which always threat¬ 
en another deluge—in short, a God driven from the em¬ 
pire of the intermediate causes is only a cause by name, 
a harmless and very modest creature of imagination—a 
mere hypothesis for the purpose of solving a theoretical 
problem, for explaining the commencement of Nature or 
rather of organic life. For the assumption of a being 
different from Nature, with the purpose of explaining 
her existence, has its origin only in the impossibility— 
although this is only a relative and subjective one—of 
explaining organic and particularly human life from Na¬ 
ture, inasmuch as- the Theist makes his inability to ex¬ 
plain life through Nature, an inability of Nature to 
produce life out of herself, and thus extends the limits 
of his intellect to limits of Nature. 

§ 16. Creation and preservation are inseparable. If, 
tnerefore, a being different from Nature—a God— is 
our creator, he is also our preserver, and not the power 
of the air, of heat, of the water or of bread, but the power 
of God sustains and preserves us. “ In him we live and 
move and have our being.” “ Not bread ” says Luther, 
“ but the word of God nourishes also the body naturally, 
as it creates and preserves all things.” “ Because it 
exists, he ( God ) nourishes by it and under it, so that 
we do not see it, and think that the bread does it. But 



16 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


where it does not exist, he nourishes without the "bread, 
through his word only, as he does it by the bread.” “In 
fine, all creatures are God’s masks and mummeries 
which he permits to assist him in all kind of work that 
he otherwise can, and really does perform without their 
co-operation.” But if, instead of Nature, God is our 
preserver, Nature is a mere disguise of the Deity, and, 
therefore, a superfluous and imaginary being, just as vice 
versa, God is a superfluous and imaginary being if Nature 
preserves us. But now it is manifest and undeniable 
that we owe our preservation only to the peculiar effects, 
qualities and powers of natural beings, therefore we are 
not only entitled, but compelled, to conclude that we 
owe also our origin to Nature. We are placed right in 
the midst of Nature, and should our beginning, our origin, 
lie outside of Nature ? We live within Nature, with Na¬ 
ture, by Nature, and should we still not be of her ? What 
a contradiction! 

§ 17. The earth has not always been in its present 
state, on the contrary, it has come to its actual condition 
through a series of developments and revolutions, and 
geology has discovered that in the different stages of its 
development several species of plants and animals existed, 
which no longer exist nor even have existed for ages. 
Thus, for instance, there exist no longer any Trilobites 
nor any Encinites or Ammonites or Pterodactyles or 
Ichthyosauri, or Plesiosauri, or Megatheria or Dino- 
theria, &c. And why not? Apparently because the 
condition of their existence no longer exist. But if the 
end of any life coincides with the end of its conditions, 
then also the beginning, the origin of such life coincides 
with the origin of its conditions. Even now-a-days 
where plants, at least tlioso of higher organizations, 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


17 


come to life only by organic procreation, they can—in a 
very remarkable, yet unexplained manner—be seen to 
appear in numberless multitudes as soon as the pecu¬ 
liar conditions of their life are given. The origin of or¬ 
ganic life cannot, therefore, be thought of as an isolated 
act, as an act after the origin of the conditions of life, but 
rather as the act by which and the moment in which the 
temperature, the air, the water, the earth in general, re¬ 
ceived such qualities, and oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nit¬ 
rogen entered into such combinations as were necessary 
for the existence of organic life — this moment must 
also be considered as the moment when these elements 
combined for the formation of organic bodies. If, there¬ 
fore, the earth, by virtue of its * own nature, has in the 
course of time developed and cultivated itself to such a 
degree that it adopted a character agreeable to the exist¬ 
ence of man and suitable to man’s nature, or so to say, 
a human character: then it could produce man also by 
its own power. 

§ 18. The power of Nature is not unlimited like the 
power of God, i. e. the power of human imagination ; she 
cannot do everything at all times and under all circum¬ 
stances—her productions and effects on the contrary 
are dependent on conditions. If, therefore, Nature nowa¬ 
days cannot or does not produce any organic bodies by 
generatio cequivoca , this is no proof that she could not 
do it in former times. The present character of the earth 
is that of stability; the time of revolutions is gone by, 
the earth has done raging. The volcanoes only are some 
single turbulent heads which have no influence on the 
masses, and which therefore do not disturb the existing 
order of things. Even the grandest volcanic event with¬ 
in the memory of man, viz., the rising of Jorullo in 





18 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


Mexico, was nothing but a local rebellion. But as man 
manifests only in extraordinary times extraordinary 
powers, or as he can do only in times of the highest 
exultation and emotion what at other times is impossible 
for him, and as the plant only at certain epochs, such as 
the period of germinating, blooming and impregnation 
produces heat and consumes carbon and hydrogen, thus 
exhibiting an animal function, which is directly in con¬ 
tradiction to its ordinary vegetable functions; so also 
the earth only in the time of its geological revolutions, 
when all its powers and elements were in a state of 
highest fermentation, ebullition and tension, developed 
its power of producing animals. We know Nature only 
in its present state; how then could we conclude that 
what does not happen now by Nature, might not happen 
at all—even at entirely different times, under entirely 
different conditions and relations ? 5 ) 

§ 19. The Christians have not been able to express with 
sufficient strength their astonishment that the heathen 
adored created beings as divine ones, but they might 
rather have admired them on that account, for such ado¬ 
ration was based on a perfectly true contemplation of 
Nature. To be produced, to come into life, is nothing 
else but to be individualized. All individual beings are 
produced, but the general fundamental elements or be¬ 
ings of Nature which have no individuality are not 
produced. Matter is not produced. But an individual 
being is of a higher, more divine quality than that with¬ 
out individuality. It is true that birth is disgraceful 
and death painful, but he who does not wish to begin and 
to end may resign the rank of a living being. Eternity 
excludes life, and life excludes eternity. Certainly does 1 
the individual presuppose another being which pro- 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


19 


duces it; but the latter does not stand above, it 
stands below its product. True, the producing being 
is the cause of existence and in that respect the first 
being; still it is at the same time the mere means 
and material; the basis of another being’s existence, and 
therefore a subordinate being. The child consumes the 
mother, disposes of her strength and of her substance to 
his own advantage, paints his cheeks with her blood. 
And the child is the mother’s pride; she places it above 
herself, subordinating her existence and welfare to that 
of the child; even the animal mother sacrifices her own 
life for that of her young ones. The deepest disgrace of 
any being is death, but the source of death is the act of 
begetting. To beget is nothing but to' throw one’s self 
away, to make one’s self common, to be. lost among the 
multitude, to sacrifice one’s singleness and exclusiveness 
to other beings. Nothing is more full of contradiction, 
more perverse and void of sense, than to consider the 
natural being as produced by a supreme, perfectly spirit¬ 
ual being. According to such a process, and in consis¬ 
tency with the creature’s being only an image of the 
creator, also the human children ought not to originate 
in the disgraceful, lowly placed organ of the womb, but 
in the highest organization, the head. 

§ 20. The ancient Greeks derived all springs, wells, 
streams, lakes and oceans from Oceanos ; and tiie ancient 
Persians made all mountains of the earth originate in the 
mountain Albordy. Is the derivation of all beings from 
one perfect being any tiling different or better ? No, it is 
based upon the same manner of thinking. As Albordy 
is a mountain like all those which have their origin in it, 
so also the divine being, as the source of those derived 
from it, is like them, not different., from them as to 



20 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 


species; but as the Albordy is distinguished from all 
other mountains by preserving their qualities preemin¬ 
ently, i. e. in a degree exaggerated by imagination to the 
utmost, up to heaven, beyond the sun, moon and stars, so 
also the divine being is distinguished from all other beings, i 
Unity is unproductive; only dualism, contrast, difference I 
is productive. That which produces the mountains is not 1 
only different from them, but something manifold in 
itself. And those elements which produce water, are | 
not only different from the water, but also from them- j 
selves, nay, even antagonistic to one another. Just as i 
genius, wit, acumen and judgment are produced and de¬ 
veloped only by contrasts and conflicts, so also life was 
produced only by the conflict of different, nay, of 
antagonistic elements, forces and beings. 

§ 21. “ How should he who made the ear not hear ? 

How should lie who made the eye not see ?” This 
biblical or theistical derivation of the being endowed 
with the senses of hearing and seeing from another being 
endowed with the same senses, or to use an expression of 
the modern, philosophic language, the derivation of the 
spiritual and subjective being from another spiritual and 
subjective being, is based upon the same foundation, and 
expresses the same as the biblical explanation of the 
rain from heavenly masses of water collected beyond or 
in the clouds, or the Persian derivation of the mountains 
from the original mountain, Albordy, or the Grecian ex¬ 
planation of fountains and rivers from Oceanos. Water 
from water, but from an immensely great and all-embrac- 
. ing water; mountain from mountain, but from an infinite 
all-embracing mountain; so spirit from spirit, life from 
life, eye from eye—but from an infinite, all-embracing 
eye, life and spirit; 



THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


21 


§ 22. "When children inquire about the origin of 
babes, we give them the explanation that the nnrse 
takes them from the well where they swim like fishes. 
The explanation which theology gives ns of the origin of 
organic or natural beings in general is not much differ¬ 
ent. God is the deep or beautiful well of imagination in 
which all realities, all perfections, all forces are contained, 
in which all things swim already made like little fishes. 
Theology is the nurse who takes them from this well, but 
the chief person, Nature, the mother who brings forth 
the children with pangs, who bears them during nine 
months under her heart, is left entirely out of considera¬ 
tion in such an explanation, which originally was only 
childlike, but now-a-days is childish. Certainly such an 
explanation is more beautiful, more pleasant to the 
heart, easier, more intelligible and conceivable to the 
children of God than the natural way, which only by 
degrees and through numberless obstacles rises from 
darkness to fight. But also the explanation which our 
pious forefathers gave of hailstorms, epidemics among 
cattle, drought and thunderstorms, by tracing them to 
the agency of weather-makers, sorcerers, and witches, is 
far more practical, easier, and, to uneducated men even 
now-a-days much more intelligible than the explanation 
of these phenomena from natural causes. 

§ 23. “The origin of fife is inexplicable and incon¬ 
ceivable.” Be it so; but this incomprehensibility does 
not justify us in drawing from it the superstitious conse¬ 
quences which theology draws from the deficiencies of 
human knowledge, nor in going beyond the sphere of 
natural causes: for we can only say, “we cannot explain 
life from these natural phenomena and causes which are 
known to us, or as far as they are known to us”—but 




22 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


we cannot say, “ life cannot be explained at all from 
Nature,” without pretending to have exhausted ^al¬ 
ready the ocean of Nature even to the last drop. 
This incomprehensibility does not justify us in explain¬ 
ing the inexplicable by the supposition of imagined be¬ 
ings, and in deceiving and deluding ourselves and others 
by an explanation which explains nothing. It does not 
justify us in changing an ignorance of natural material 
causes into a non-existence of such causes, and in deify¬ 
ing, personifying, representing our ignorance in a being 
which is to destroy such ignorance, and which yet does 
not express anything but the nature of such ignorance, 
the deficiency of positive, material reasons of explana¬ 
tion. For what else is the immaterial, incorporeal, not . 
natural, extramundane being to whom we thus try to 
trace back all life, but the precise expression of the 
intellectual absense of material, corporeal, natural, 
cosmical causes? But instead of being so honest and 
modest as to say frankly: “We do not know any reason, 
we do not know how to explain it, we have no data nor 
materials,” you change these deficiencies, these nega¬ 
tions, these vacancies of your head by the activity of 
your imagination into positive beings, into immaterial 
beings, i. .e into beings which are not material nor 
natural, because you do not know of any material or 
natural causes. While ignorance however is contented 
with immaterial, incorporeal, unnatural beings, her in¬ 
separable companion, wanton imagination, which al¬ 
ways and exclusively indulges in the intercourse with 
beings of the highest perfection, immediately elevates 
these poor creatures of ignorance to the rank of super¬ 
material, supernatural beings. 

§ 24. The idea that Nature or the universe in general 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


23 


has a real beginning, and that consequently at sometime 
there was no Nature, no universe, is a narrow idea, 
which seems acceptable to man only as long as he has 
a narrow, limited conception of the world. It is an 
magination without sense and foundation—this imagin¬ 
ation that at some time nothing real existed, for the 
universe is the totality of all reality. All qualities or 
definitions of God which make him an objective, real 
being are only qualities abstracted from Nature , which 
presuppose and define Nature, and which therefore 
would not exist if Nature did not exist. It is true, if 
we abstract from Nature : if in our thoughts or our ima¬ 
gination we destroy her existence, i. e. if we shut our 
eyes and extinguish all images of natural things reflected 
by our senses and conceive Nature not with our senses 
(not in concreto as the philosophers say) there is left a 
being, a totality of qualities such as infinity, power, 
unity, necessity, eternity; but this being which is left 
after deducting all qualities and phenomena reflected by 
our senses is in truth nothing but the abstract essence 
of Nature, or Nature “ in abstract I,” in thought. And 
such derivation of Nature or the universe from God is 
therefore in this respect nothing but the derivation ol 
the real essence of Nature, as it appears to our senses, 
from her abstract, imagined essence, which exists only in 
our idea—a derivation which appears to be reason¬ 
able because in the act of thinking we are accus¬ 
tomed to consider the abstract and general as that which 
is nearer to thought, and which therefore must be pre¬ 
supposed to the individual, the real, the concrete, as that 
which is higher and earlier in thought, although in 
reality just the reverse takes place, inasmuch as Nature 
exists before God, i. e. the concrete before the abstract, 





24 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


that which we conceive with onr senses before that 
which is thought. In reality, where everything passes 
on naturally, the copy follows the original, the image 
the thing which it represents, the thought its object— 
but on the supernatural, miraculous ground of theology, 
the original follows the copy, the thing its own likeness. 
“ It is strange ” says St. Augustine, “ but nevertheless 
true, that this world could not exist if it was not known 
to God.” That means: the world is known and thought 
before it exists; nay, it exists only because it was 
thought of—the existence is a consequence of the knowl¬ 
edge or of the act of thinking, the original a conse¬ 
quence of the copy, the object a consequence of its 
likeness. 

§ 25. If we reduce the world or Nature to a totality 
of abstract qualities, to a metaphysical, i. e. to a merely 
imagined object, and consider this abstract world as the 
real world, then it is a logical necessity to consider it as 
finite. The world is not given to us through the act of 
thinking, not at least through the metaphysical and hy¬ 
perphysical thinking which abstracts from the real world 
and founds its true and highest existence upon such ab¬ 
straction—the world is given to us through life, by per 
ception, by the senses. For an abstract being which 
only thinks there exists no light, because it has no eyes, 
no warmth, because it has no feeling, in general no world 
because it has no organ for its perception; for such a 
being there exists in reality nothing. The world, there¬ 
fore, exists for us only because we are no logical or meta¬ 
physical beings, because we are other beings, because 
we are more than mere logicians and metaphysicians. 
But just this plus appears to the metaphysical thinker as 
a minus , this negation of the art of thinking as an abso- 



THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


25 


lute negation. Nature to him is nothing but the oppo¬ 
site of mind. This merely negative and abstract definition 
he makes her positive definition, her essence. Conse¬ 
quently it is a contradiction to consider as a positive 
being that being, or rather that nonentity which is only 
the negation of the act of thinking, which is an imagined 
thing, but according to its nature an object of the senses, 
that is antagonistic to the act of thinking and to the 
mind. The being which exists in thought is for the 
thinker the true essence, therefore it is self-evident to 
him that a being which does not exist in thought cannot 
be a true, eternal, original essence. It implies already a 
contradiction for the mind to think only of its opposite ; 
it is only in harmony with itself when it thinks only itself 
( on the standpoint of metaphysical speculation,) or at 
least (on the standpoint of theism) when it thinks an es¬ 
sence which expresses nothing but the nature of the act 
of thinking, which is given only by thought, and which 
therefore in itself is nothing but an imagined being. 
Thus Nature disappears into nothing. But still she exists , 
though according to the thinker she neither can nor 
should be. How then does the metaphysician explain 
her existence ? By a self-privation, a self-negation, a self- 
denial of the mind which apparently is a voluntary onc> 
but which in very truth is contradictory to, and only en¬ 
forced upon his inner nature. But if Nature on the 
standpoint of abstract thinking disappears into nothing, 
on the other hand on the standpoint of the real observa¬ 
tion and contemplation of the world, that creative mind 
disappears into nothing. On this standpoint all deduc¬ 
tions of the world from God, of Nature from the mind, 
of physics from metaphysics, of the real from the ab¬ 
stract, are proved to be nothing but logical jplays. 




26 THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 

§ 26 . Nature is tlie first and fundamental object of 
religion, but she is such an object even where she is the 
direct and immediate object of religious adoration, as e. 
g. in the natural religions so-called, not as such, as 
Nature, i. e., in the manner and in the sense in which 
we regard her from the standpoint of theism or of 
philosophy and of the natural sciences. Nature is to 
man originally, i. e., where he regards her with a relig¬ 
ious eye, rather an object of his own qualities, a person¬ 
al, living, feeling being. Man originally does not dis¬ 
tinguish himself from Nature, nor consequently Nature 
from himself, therefore the sensations which any object 
in Nature excites in him appear to him immediately as 
qualities of the object. The beneficial, good sensations 
and effects are caused by good and benevolent Nature, 
the bad, painful sensations, such as heat, cold, hunger, 
pain, disease, by an evil being, or at least by Nature in a 
state of evil disposition, of malevolence, of wrath. Thus 
man involuntarily and unconsciously, i. e., necessarily— 
although this necessity is only a relative and historical 
one—transforms the essence of Nature into a feeling, 
i. e. a subjective, a human being. No wonder that he 
then also expressively, knowingly and willingly trans¬ 
forms her into an object of religion, of prayer, i. e. an 
object which can be influenced by the feelings of man, 
his prayers, his services. Really, man has made Nature 
already subservient and subdued her to himself by 
assimilating her to his feelings and subduing her to his 
passions. Besides, uneducated natural man does not 
only presuppose human motives, impulses and passions 
in Nature, he sees even real men in natural bodies. 
Thus the Indians on the Orinoco think the sun, the moon 
and the stars, to be men—“ those up there,” they say “are 





THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


27 


men like unto usThe Patagonians think the stars to 
be “ former Indiansthe Greenlanders think the sun, 
moon and stars, to be their ancestors, who at a particular 
occasion were translated into heaven.” Thus also the an¬ 
cient Mexicans believed that the sun and the moon which 
they adored as gods had been men in former times. 
Behold thus the assertion made in my “ Essence of 
Christianity ” that man in religion is in relation to an 
intercourse with himself only, and that his God in reality 
reflects only his own essence—this assertion is confirmed 
even by the most uncultivated, primary manifestations 
of religion ; where man adores things the most distant 
from and most unlike to himself, such as stars, stones, 
trees, nay, even the claws of crabs, and snail shells ; for 
he adores them only because he transfers himself into 
them, because he believes them to be such beings, or at 
least to he inhabited by such beings as himself. Re¬ 
ligion therefore exhibits the remarkable contradiction, 
which however is easily understood, nay, even necessary, 
that, while on one hand (from the standpoint of theism 
or anthropologism) she worships the human essence as a 
divine one, because it appears to her as different from 
man, as an essence not human—on the other hand (from 
the materialistic standpoint) she adores vice versa the 
essence which is not human as a divine one, because it 
appears to her as a human one. 

§ 27? The mutability of Nature, especially in those 
phenomena which most of all cause man to feel his de¬ 
pendence on her, is the principal reason why she appears 
to man as a human, arbitrary being, and why she is re¬ 
ligiously adored by him. If the sun stood always in the 
sky, he would never have kindled the fire of religious 
passion in man. Only when he disappeared from man’s 




28 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


eye and inflicted upon him the terrors of night, an i when 
again he re-appeared, man fell down on his knees before 
him, overcome by joy at his unexpected return. Thus 
the ancient Apalachites in Florida greeted the sun with 
hymns at his rising and setting, and prayed to him at 
the same time that he might return and bless them with 
his light. If the earth always produced fruits, where 
would there be a motive for religious celebrations of the* 
time of sowing and harvesting? Only in consequence of 
her now opening, now closing her womb, her fruits ap¬ 
pear to be her voluntary gifts which oblige man to be 
grateful. The changes in Nature make man uncertain, 
humble, religious. It is uncertain, whether the weather 
to-morrow will be favorable to my undertakings; is it 
uncertain whether I shall harvest what I sow, and there¬ 
fore I cannot depend upon the gifts of Nature as upon a 
tribute due, or an infallible consequence. But where 
mathematical certainty is at an end, there theology 
commences, even now-a-days in weak minds. Beligion 
is the conception of the necessary—or of the accidental 
—as of something arbitrary, or voluntary. The opposite 
sentiment, that of irreligion and ungodliness, on the 
other hand, is represented by the Cyclops of Euripides, 
when he says: “Earth must produce grass for feeding 
my flock, whether she be willing to do so or not” 

§ 28 . The feeling of dependence upon Nature in 
combination with the imagination of her as o£ an arbi¬ 
trarily acting, personal being, is the motive of the sacri¬ 
fice, the most essential act of natural religion. The de¬ 
pendence upon Nature is particularly sensible to me by my 
want of her. The want is the feeling and expression of 
my nothingness without Nature; but inseparable from 
want is enjoyment, the opposite feeling, the feeling of 



THE ESSENCE OE RELIGION. 


29 


my self-existence, of my independence in distinction from 
Nature. Want, therefore, is pious, humble, religious— 
but enjoyment is haughty, ungodly, void of respect, fri¬ 
volous. And such frivolity, or at least want of respect 
in enjoyment, is a practical necessity for man, a necessi¬ 
ty upon which his existence is founded—but a necessity 
which is in direct contradiction to his theoretical respect 
for Nature as for an egotistic, sensible being, which 
suffers as little as man that anything be taken from her. 
The appropriation or the use of Nature appears therefore 
to man, as if it were an encroachment upon her right, as 
an appropriation of another one’s property, as an outrage. 
In order now to propitiate his conscience as well as the 
object of his imaginary offence; in order to show that his 
robbery has its origin in want, not in arrogance, he dimin¬ 
ishes his enjoyment and returns to the object a part of 
its plundered property. Thus the Greeks believed that 
if a t»ree were cut down, its soul, the Dryad, lamented 
and cried to Fate for revenge against the trespasser. 
Thus no Koman ventured to cut down a tree on his ground 
without sacrificing a farrow for the propitiation of the 
god or goddess of this grove. Thus the Ostiaks, after 
having slain a bear, suspend its skin on a tree, pay to it 
all sorts of reverences, and apologize as well as they can 
to the bear for having killed him. “ They believe in this 
manner politely to avert the damage which the spirit of 
the animal possibly could inflict upon them.” Thus 
North American tribes by similar ceremonies propitiate 
the departed souls of slain beasts. Thus the Philippines 
asked the plains and mountains for their permission, if 
they wished to cross them, and deemed it a crime to cut 
down any old tree. And the Bramin hardly dares to 
drink water or to tread upon the ground with his feet, 





30 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


because each step, each draught of water causes pain and 
death to sentient beings, plants as well as animals, and 
he must therefore do penance “in order to atone for the 
death of creatures which he possibly, although unconsci¬ 
ously might destroy by day or night.” ( 6 ) 

§ 29. The sacrifice makes perceptible to the senses 
the whole essence of religion. Its source is the feeling 
of dependence, fear, doubt, the uncertainty of success, of 
future events, the scruples of conscience on account of 
a sin committed; but the result, the purpose of the sacri¬ 
fice is self-consciousness, courage, enjoyment, the cer¬ 
tainty of success, liberty and happiness. As a servant of 
Nature I observe the sacrifice; as her master I depart 
from it. Therefore, although the feeling of dependence 
upon Nature is the source and motive of religion: its 
very purpose and end is the destruction of such feeling, 
the independence from Nature. Or, although the divin¬ 
ity of Nature is the basis, the foundation of religion 
generally and of Christian religion in particular, still its 
end is the divinity of man. 

% § 30. Religion has for its presupposition the contra¬ 

diction between will and ability , desire and satisfaction, • 
intention and success, imagination and reality, thought 
and existence. In his desire, in his imagination, man is 
unlimited, free, almighty—God; but in his ability, in 
reality, he is bound, dependent, limited— man ; man in 
the sense of a finite being, in contradistinction from God. 
“Man proposes, God disposes,” as the saying is. “Man 
plans and Jove accomplishes it differently.” The 
thought, the will is mine ; but what I think and will is 
not mine, is outside of me, does not depend on me. The 
destruction of such a contrast or contradiction is the ten¬ 
dency, the purpose of religion; and that being in which 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


31 


it is destroyed, and wherein that whicli I wish and imag¬ 
ine as possible, which however my limited power proves 
to be impossible for me, is possible, nay even real—that 
being is the divine being. 

§ 31. That which is independent from the will and 
the knowledge of man is the original, proper, character¬ 
istic cahse of religion—the cause of God. “I have 
planted” says Paul, “Apollos watered, but God gave 
the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any¬ 
thing, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the 
increase.” And Luther says: “We must praise and 
thank God that he suffers grain to grow, and acknowl¬ 
edge that it is not our work, but his blessing and his 
gift, if grain and wine and all sorts of fruit grow which 
we eat and drink to satisfy our wants.” And Hesiod 
says, that the industrious husbandman will richly harvest 
if Jove grants a good end. The tilling of the soil then, 
the sowing and watering of the seed, depends on me, but 
not the succes. This is in God’s hand, therefore it is 
said: “ God’s blessing is the main thing.” But what is 
God? originally nothing but Nature, or the essence of 
Nature ; but Nature as an object of prayer, as an exor- 
able^nd consequently willing being. Jove is the cause 
or the essence of meteorological phenomena; but this 
does not yet constitute his divine, his religious charac¬ 
ter; also he who is not religious assumes a cause of the 
rain, of the thunder storm, of the snow. He is God 
only, because and in so far as these phenomena de¬ 
pend on his good will. That which is independent 
of man’s will is, therefore, by religion, made depen¬ 
dent upon God’s will as far as the object itself is con¬ 
cerned (objectively); but subjectively (as far as man is 
concerned,) it is made dependent on prayer, for what 





32 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


depends on will is an object of prayer and can be 
changed. “ Even the Gods are pliable. A mortal can 
change their minds by incense and humble vows, by li¬ 
bations and perfume.” 

§ 32. The only or at least the principal object of re¬ 
ligion is an object of human purposes and wants, at least 
where man has once risen beyond the unlimited arbi¬ 
trariness, helplessness and accidentalness of Fetishism 
proper. For this very reason those natural beings which 
are most necessary and indispensable to man enjoyed al¬ 
so the most general and the highest religious adoration. 
But whatever is an object of human wants and purposes, 
is for the same reason an object of human wishes. I 
need rain and sunshine for the successful growth of my 
seeds. In times of continuous drouth I therefore wish 
for rain; in times of continuous rain I wish for sunshine. 
This wish is a desire whose gratification is not within my 
power ; a will, but without the might to prevail, although 
not absolutely so, yet at least at a given time, under cer¬ 
tain circumstances and conditions, and such as man 
wishes it on the stand point of religion. But just what 
my body, my power in general, is unable to do, is within 
the power of my wish. What I ask and wish for, that I 
enchant and inspire by my wishes. ( 7 ) While under the 
influence of an affect—and religion roots only in affect, 
in feeling—man places his essence without himself; he 
treats as living what is without life, as arbitrary what 
has no will; he animates the object with his sighs, for he 
cannot possibly in a state of affect address himself to an 
insensible being. Feeling does not confine itself within 
the limits prescribed by intellect; it gushes over man ; 
his breast is too narrow for it; it must communicate it¬ 
self to the outer world and by so doing make the insensi- 





THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


33 


ble essence of "Nature a sympathetic one. Nature en¬ 
chanted by human feeling, Nature agreeing with and as¬ 
similated to man’s feeling, i. e., Nature herself endowed 
with feeling, is Nature such as she is an object of reli¬ 
gion^ a divine being . The wish is the origin , the very 
essence of religion—the essence of the Gods is nothing 
but the essence of the wish. ( 8 ) The Gods are superhu¬ 
man and supernatural beings j but are not wishes also of 
a superhuman and supernatural nature ? e. g. am I in 
my wish, in my imagination still a man, if I wish to be 
an immortal being, free from the fetters of the earthly 
body? No ! He who has no wishes has no gods either. 
Why did the Greeks lay such a stress upon the immor¬ 
tality and happiness of the Gods ? Because they them¬ 
selves did not wish to be mortal and unhappy. Where 
no lamentations about man’s mortality and misery are 
heard, no hymns are heard in honor of the immortal and 
happy Gods. Only the water of tears shed within the 
human heart evaporates in the sky of imaginatian into 
the cloudy image of the divine being. From the univer¬ 
sal stream, Oceanos, Homer derives the Gods ; but this 
stream abounding with Gods is in reality only an efflux 
of human feelings. 

§ 33. The irreligious manifestations of religion are 
best adapted to disclose in a popular manner the origin, 
and essence of religion. Thus it is an irreligious mani¬ 
festation of religion and therefore most severely criticized 
already by the pious heathen, that as a general thing 
man takes recourse to religion, that he applies to God 
and thinks of him, only in times of misfortune ; but this 
very fact reveals to us the source of religion. In times 
of misfortune or distress, no matter whether it be his 
own or another one’s, man realizes the painful experience 





34 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


of his inability to do what he wishes—he finds his hands 
tied. But the palsy of the motory nerves is not at the 
same time also the palsy of the sensory nerves; the fetters 
of my physical power are not also at the same time the 
fetters of my will, of my heart. On the contrary, the 
more my hands are tied, the more boundless are my 
wishes, the more ardent is my desire for redemption, the 
more energetic my strife after freedom, my will not to 
be limited. The power of the human heart or will which 
by the influence of distress has been exaggerated and 
overexcited to a superhuman one, is the power of the 
Gods for whom there is no necessity nor limit. The 
Gods are able to do what man desires, i. e. they obey 
the laws of the human heart. What man is only in re¬ 
gard to his soul, the Gods are also physically; what he 
can do only within his will, his imagination, his heart, i. 
e. y mentally , as e. g. to be in the twinkling of an eye at 
a distant place, that the Gods are able to do physically. 
The Gods are the embodied, realized wishes of man— 
the natural limits of man’s heart aud will destroyed— 
creatures of the unlimited will, creatures whose physical 
powers are equal to those of the will. The irreligious 
manifestation of this supernatural power of religion is 
the practice of witchcraft among uncivilized nations, 
where in & palpable manner the mere will of man ap¬ 
pears as God, commanding over Nature. But when the 
God of Israel at Joshua’s command bids the sun stand 
still or suffers it to rain in compliance with Elijah’s 
prayer, and when the God of the Christians for the sake 
of proving his divinity, i. e ., his power to fulfill all wishes 
of man, by his word alone appeases the raging sea, cures 
the sick, raises the dead: here as well as in the practice 
,of witchcraft, the mere will, the mere wish, the mere 




THE ESSENCE OE RELIGION. 35 

word is declared a power that overrules Nature. The 
only difference is that the sorcerer realizes the end of re¬ 
ligion in an irreligious manner, whilst the Jew and the 
Christians do it in a religious manner, inasmuch as the 
former places within himself , what the latter transfers 
into God , inasmuch as the former makes the object of 
an expressive will or command what the latter make the 
object of a still submissive will, of a pious wish; in short 
inasmuch as the former does by and for himself, what 
the latter do by and with God. But the common say¬ 
ing : “ quod quis per alium fecit ipse fecisse putaturf 
i. e. what one does through another one that is imputed to 
him as his own deed, finds its application also here: 
what one does through God , that he does in reality 
himself. 

§ 34. Religion has—at least originally and in rela¬ 
tion to nature—no other office and tendency than to 
change the unpopular and haunted essence of Nature into 
a familiar and known one; to melt Nature, who in her¬ 
self is impliant and hard as iron, in the glowing fire of 
the heart for the sake of human purposes; i. e., it has the 
same end as civilization or culture, whose end also is no 
other than to make Nature theoretically an intelligible 
and practically a pliable being, agreeable to the wants of 
man- with this only difference , that what culture tries to 
attain by means , and that too by means learned from Na¬ 
ture, religion attains without means, or what is the same, 
through the supernatural means of prayer, of faith, of 
sacraments, of witchcraft. Thus we find that everything 
which with the progress of the civilization of mankind* 
became a cause of activity, of self-activity, of anthropol¬ 
ogy , in former times was a cause of religion or theology ; 
as, for instance, jurisprudence, politics, medicine, which 




36 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


latter even now-a-days among uncivilized nations is a 
thing of religion. ( 9 ) It is true, culture and civilization 
always come short of the wishes of religion, for it cannot 
destroy those limits of man which have their foundation 
in his Nature. Thus culture succeeds for instance in 
improving the science of prolongating life (Macrobio¬ 
tics) but it never attains to immortality. This as a 
boundless wish which cannot be realized is left to re¬ 
ligion. 

§ 35. In natural religion man addresses himself to an 
object directly antagonistic to the original will and sense 
of religion; for here he sacrifices his feelings and his 
intellect to a being which in itself is without feeling and 
intellect; he places above himself what he would like to 
have below himself; he serves what he wishes to govern, 
adores what in reality he abhors, entreats for assistance 
that against which he seeks assistance. Thus the Greeks 
at Titane sacrificed to the winds in order to appease 
their rage; thus the Romans dedicated a temple to the 
Fever in order to render it harmless; thus the Tungus- 
ians at the time of an epidemic pray devotionally and 
with solemn bows to the disease that it may jwss by 
their huts (according to Pallas.) Thus the Widahians 
in Guinea sacrifice to the raging sea in order to prevail 
upon it that it may be calm and not prevent them from 
fishing; thus the Indians at the approach of a storm ad¬ 
dress the Manitou (i. e. Spirit, God, Being) of the air, 
at the crossing of water the Manitou of the waters, that 
he -may preserve them from all danger ; thus in general 
many nations expressively do not adore the good but the 
evil essence ( 10 ) of Nature, or at least what appears to 
them as such. Upon the standpoint of natural religion 
,man declares his love to a statue, to a corpse; no wonder 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


37 


therefore, that in order to make himself heard he resorts 
to the most desperate, most insane means; no wonder 
that he divests himself of his humanity hi order to ren¬ 
der Nature humane , that he even sheds the blood of man 
in order to inspire her with human feelings. Thus the 
northern Germans believed expressly that “ sanguinary 
sacrifices were apt to bestow human language and feel¬ 
ings to wooden idols and to endow with the gifts of 
language and divination the stones which they adored 
in the houses devoted to gory sacrifices.” But in vain 
are all attempts to imbue her with life ; Nature does not 
respond to man’s lamentations and questions ; she throws 
him inexorably back upon himself. 

§ 36. As the limits which man imagines or at least such 
as he imagines them on the standpoint of religion (as e. g. 
the limit which is the cause that he does not know the 
future, or does not live forever, or does not enjoy happi¬ 
ness without interruption and molestation, or has no body 
without weight, or cannot fly like the Gods, or cannot 
thunder like Jove, or cannot add anything to his size 
nor make himself invisible at will, or cannot, like the 
angels, live without sensual wants and impulses, or in 
short cannot do what he wills and desires)—as all these 
limits are such only in his imagination and mind, while 
in reality they are no limits, because they have their 
necessary foundation in the essence , in the nature of 
things; so also is that being which is free from such 
limits, the unlimited divine being, only a creature of 
imagination, of reflection, and of a mental disposition 
which is governed by imagination. Whatever therefore 
may be the object of religion, be it even only a snail 
shell or pebble, it is such an object only in its quality as 
a creature of the heart , of reflection , of imagination. 




38 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


This justifies the assertion that men do not adore the 
stones, the trees, the animals, the rivers themselves, but 
the Gods within them, their manitous, their spirits. But 
these spirits of natural objects are nothing but their re¬ 
flected images or they as reflected objects , as creatures 
of imagination in distinction from them as real , sen¬ 
sual objects , just as the spirits of the dead are nothing 
but the imagined images of the dead which live in our 
remembrance— beings that once really existed , as imag¬ 
ined beings , which however by religious man, i. e. by 
him who does not discriminate between the object and 
its idea, are considered to be real, self-existing beings. 
Man’s pious, involuntary self-deception upon the stand¬ 
point of religion is therefore within the natural religion 
an apparent , self-evident truth ; for here man gives to 
his religious object eyes and ears which he knows and 
sees to be artificial eyes and ears of or wood , and 
yet believes to be real eyes and ears. Thus religious 
man has his eyes only in order not to see, to be stone- 
blind, and his reason only in order not to reason, to be 
block-headed. Natural religion is the manifest contra¬ 
diction between idea and reality, between imagination 
and truth. What in reality is a dead stone or log, is in 
the conception of natural religion a living individual; 
apparently , no God, but something entirely different, 
yet invisibly , according to belief, a God. For this rea¬ 
son, natural religion is always in danger of being most 
bitterly undeceived, as it requires only a blow with an 
axe in order to satisfy her, e. g. that no blood flows from 
adored trees, and that therefore no living, divine being 
dwells within them. But how does religion escape these 
strong contradictions and disappointments to which she 
is exposed by adoring Nature? Only by making her 





•THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


39 


object an invisible , not sensual one, by making it a 
being that exists only in faith, reflection, imagination— 
in short, within the mind, which therefore itself is a 
spiritual being. 

§ 37. As soon as man from a merely physical being 
becomes a political one, or in general a being distinguish¬ 
ing himself from Nature, and concentrating himself 
within himself, his God is also changed from a merely 
physical being iuto a political one, different from Na¬ 
ture . That which leads man to a distinction of his 
essence from Nature, and in consequence to a God dis¬ 
tinguished from Nature, is therefore only his association 
with other men to a commonwealth , wherein the objects 
of his consciousness and of his feeling of dependence 
are powers distinguished from those of Nature and ex¬ 
isting only in thought or imagination; political, moral, 
abstract powers, such as the power of law, of public 
opinion, ( 1J ) of honor, of virtue—while his physical ex¬ 
istence is subordinated to his human, political or moral 
existence, and where the power of Nature, the power 
over death and life, is degraded to an attribute and in¬ 
strument of political or moral power. Jove is the God 
of lightning and thunder; but he possesses these terrible 
weapons only in order to crush those who disobey his 
commandments, the perjurer, the perpetrators of vio¬ 
lence. Jove is father of the kings—“from Jove are 
the kings.” 

With lightning and thunder therefore Jove sustains 
the power and dignity of the Kings. ( 12 ) “The King,” 
we read in the law-book of Menu, “ burns eyes and 
hearts like the sun , therefore no human creature upon 
earth is able even to look upon him. He is fire and air , 
he is sun and moon 3 he is the God of criminal laws. 







40 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


Fire burns only a single one wlio by carelessness may 
have approached too near to it, but a King’s fire when 
he is in wrath, burns a whole family with all their cattle 
and property-In his courage dwelleth con¬ 

quest and death in his wrathP In a similar manner 
the God of the Israelites commands amid lightning and 
thunder his people to walk in all ways which he has 
commanded them “in order that they may prosper and 
live long in the land.” Thus the power of Nature as 
such and the feeling of dependence on her disappears 
before political or moral power! Whilst the slave of 
Nature is so blinded by the brilliancy of the sun, that he 
like the Katchinian Tartar daily prays to him: “do 
not kill me,” the political slave on the other hand is so 
much blinded by the splendor of royal dignity, that lie 
prostrates himself before it as before a divine power, be¬ 
cause it commands over death and life. The titles of the 
Koman Emperors, even still among the Christians were: 
“Your divinity,” “Your eternity.” Nay, even nowa¬ 
days among Christians “Holiness” and “Majesty,” the 
titles and attributes of the Deity, are titles and attributes 
of kings. It is true the Christians try to justify this 
political idolatry with the notion that the king is nothing 
but God’s representative upon earth, God himself being 
the King of kings. But such a justification is only a 
self-deception. Not considering that the king’s power is 
a very sensible, direct and sensual one which represents 
itself, while that of the King of kings is only an indirect 
and reflected one—God is defined and regarded as the 
world’s ruler, as a royal or political being in general, 
only where the royal being occupies, influences and rules 
man so as to be considered by him as the supreme being. 
“Brahma” says Menu, “formed in the beginning of time 




THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


41 


for his service the genius ofpunishment with a body of 
pure light as his own son , nay even as the anthor oi 
criminal justice, as the protector of all things created . 
Fear of punishment enables this universe to enjoy its 
1 nippiness.” Thns man makes even the punishment of 
his criminal code divine, world-governing powers, the 
criminal code itself the code of Nature, no wonder that 
he makes Nature to sympathize most warmly with his 
political sufferings and passions, nay, that he even makes 
the preservation of the world dependent on the preserva¬ 
tion of a royal throne or of the Holy See. What is im¬ 
portant to him, naturally is also of importance for all 
other beings ; what dims his eye, that also dims the bril¬ 
liancy of the sun; what agitates his heart, that also 
moves heaven and earth—his being to him is the univer¬ 
sal being, the world’s being, the being of beings. 

§ 38. Why has the East not a living, progressive 
history such as the West? Because in the East to man 
Nature is not concealed by man, nor the brilliancy of 
the stars and precious stones by the brilliancy of the eye, 
nor the meteorological lightning and thunder by the 
rhetorical “ lightning and thunder,” nor the course of 
the sun by the course of daily events, nor the change of 
the year’s seasons by the change of fashion. It is true, 
the eastern man prostrates himself into the dust before 
the magnificence of royal, political power and dignity, 
but this magnificence itself is only a reflex of the sun and 
the moon; the king is an object of his adoration not as 
an earthly and human, but as a heavenly and divine 
being. But man disappears by the side of a God ; only 
where the earth is depopulated of Gods, where the Gods 
ascend into heaven and change from real beings to imag¬ 
ined ones; only there men have space and room for 




42 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


themselves, only there they can show themselves without 
any restraint as men and put themselves forward as such. 
The eastern man bears the same relation to the western 
man as the husbandman to the inhabitants of the city. 
The former depends on Nature, the latter on man ; the 
former is led by the barometer, the latter by the state 
of the stock-market; the former by the ever equal con¬ 
stellations of the zodiac, the latter by the ever fluctuating 
signs of honor, fashion and public opinion. Only the 
inhabitants of cities, therefore, make up history, only 
human “ vanity ” is the principle of history, only he who 
can sacrifice Nature’s power to that of opinion, his life 
to his name, his physical existence to his existence in 
the mouth and in the remembrance of generations to 
come-^he only is capable of historical deeds. 

§ 39. According to Athenseus, the Greek writer of 
comic plays, Anaxandrides addresses the Egyptians as 
follows: a I am not fit for your society; our manners 
and laws do not agree,—you adore the ox which I sacri¬ 
fice to the Gods; the eel to you is a great God, but to 
me a great dainty; you shun pork, I enjoy it with a 
relish; you revere the dog, I beat him if he snaps a 
morsel from me; you are startled if something is the 
matter with the cat, I am glad of it and strip off her skin; 
you give a great deal of importance to the shrew-mouse, 
I none.” This address perfectly characterizes the con¬ 
trast between the bound and the unbound, i. e. between 
the religious and irreligious, free, human consideration of 
Nature. There Nature is an object of adoration, here 
of enjoyment; there man exists for Nature’s sake, here 
Nature for man’s sake, there she is the end, here the 
means; there she stands above, here below man.( 13 ) For 
this very reason man is there eccentric, out of himself, out 



THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


43 


of the sphere of his destination which points mm only to 
himself ; here, on the other hand, he is considerate, sober, 
within himself, self-conscions. There man degrades him¬ 
self consistently even to coition with animals (accord¬ 
ing to Herodotus), in order to prove his religious humil¬ 
ity before Nature; but here he rises in the full conscious¬ 
ness of his power and dignity up to amalgamation with the 
Gods as a striking proof that even in the heavenly Gods 
courses no other than human blood, and that the peculiar 
ethereal blood of the Gods is only a poetical imagination 
which does not hold good in reality and practice. 

§ 40. As the world, as Nature appears to man, so 
she is i e. for him, according to his imagination; his 
sensations and imaginations are to him directly and un¬ 
consciously the measure of truth and reality; and Nature 
appears to him just as he is himsdf. As soon as man 
perceives that in spite of sun and moon, heaven and 
earth, fire and water, plants and animals, man’s life re¬ 
quires the application and even the just application of his 
own powers; as soon as he perceives that “the mortals 
unjustly complain of the Gods, and that they themselves 
in spite of fate, through imprudence, produce their 
misery ,” that the consequences of vice and folly are di¬ 
sease, unhappiness and death, but those of virtue and wis¬ 
dom, health, life and happiness, and that, therefore, those 
powers which influence man’s destiny, are intellect and 
will; as soon, therefore, as man no more like the savage, 
is a being governed by the habits of momentary impres¬ 
sions and effects, but becomes a being which decides him¬ 
self by principles, rules of wisdom, laws of reason, i. e. a 
thinking, intelligent being—then also Nature, the world’ 
appears and is to him a being dependent on, and influ¬ 
enced by, intellect and will. 



44 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


§ 41. When man with his will and intellect rises 
above Nature and becomes 'a supernaturalist, then also 
God becomes a supernatural being. When man estab¬ 
lishes himself as a ruler “ over the fishes in the sea, and 
over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all 
the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth 
over the earth,” then the Government of Nature is to 
him the highest idea, the highest being / the object of his 
adoration, of his religion therefore, the creator of Na¬ 
ture, for creation is a necessary consequence, or rather 
presupposition, of Government. If the Lord of Nature is 
not also her author, then she is independent of him as to 
her origin and existence, his power is limited and de¬ 
ficient ;—for if he had been able to create her, why 
should he not have created her ?—his government is only 
an usurped one, no inherent, legal one. Only what I 
produce and make is entirely within my power. Only 
from authorship the right of property is to he derived. 
Mine is the child, because I am his father. Therefore, 
only in creation government is acknowledged, realized, 
exhausted. The Gods of the heathen were also already 
masters of Nature, it* is true, but no cr ators of hers, 
therefore they were only constitutional, limited, not ab¬ 
solute monarchs of Nature, i. e. the heathen were not 
yet absolute , unconditional , radical supernaturalists. 

§ 42. The Theists have declared the doctrine of the 
unity of God a revealed doctrine of supernatural origin, 
without considering that the source of Monotheism is 
in man, that the scource of God’s unity is the unity of 
the human conscience and mind. The world is spread 
before my eyes in endless multitude and diversity, but 
still all these numberless and various objects : sun, moon 
and stars, heaven and earth, the near and the distant, 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


45 


the present and the absent, are embraced by my mind, 
my head. This being of the human mind or conscience, 
so wonderful and supernatural for religious, i. e. unedu¬ 
cated man, this being which is not restrained by any 
limits of time or space, which is not limited to any par¬ 
ticular species of things, and which embraces all things 
and beings, without being himself an object or visible 
being—this being is, by Monotheism, placed at the head 
of the world, and made its cause. God speaks , God 
thinks the world and it is , he says that it is not, he 
thinks and wills it not, and it does not exist, i. e. I can 
in my imagination cause at will all things and conse¬ 
quently also the world itself to come and to disappear, to 
originate and to pass away. That God has also created 
the world from nothing, and, if he will, thrusts it again 
into nothing, is nothing but the personification of 
the human power of abstraction and imagination , 
which enables me at will to imagine the world as exist¬ 
ing or not existing, and to affirm or deny its existence. 
This subjective or imagined non-existence of the world, 
is by Monotheism made its objective , real non-existence. 
Polytheism and natural religion in general make the 
real objects imagined ones. Monotheism, on the other 
hand, makes imagined objects and thoughts real objects, 
or rather the essence of intellect, will and imagination 
the most real, absolute, supreme being. The power of 
God, says a theologian, extends as far as the imaginative 
power of man, but where is the limit of this power ? 
What is impossible to imagination ? I can imagine every¬ 
thing that is, as not existing, and everything that does 
not exist as real; thus I can imagine “this” world as 
not existing, and on the other hand, numberless other 
worlds as existing. What is imagined as real is possible. 



46 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


But God is the being to whom nothing is impossible , 
he is the creator of numberless worlds, as far as his 
power is concerned, the possibility of all possibilities , of 
everything that can be imagined ; i. e. in reality, he is 
nothing but the realization or personification of human 
imagination, intellect and reflection, thought or im¬ 
agined as real, nay, as the most real, as the absolute 
being. 

§ 43. Theism, properly so-called, or Monotheism, arises 
only where man refers Nature only to . himself , because 
she suffers herself to be used without will and conscious¬ 
ness , not only to his necessary, organic functions, but 
also to his arbitrary , conscious purposes and enjoyments, 
and where he makes this relation her essence , conse¬ 
quently making himself the purpose, the centre and uni¬ 
ty of Nature. ( 14 ) Where Nature has her end outside of 
herself , she necessarily has also her cause an;l beginning 
without herself; where she exists only for another 
being , she necessarily exists also by another being , and 
that by a being whose intention or end at the time of 
her creation was man, as that being who was to enjoy 
and to use Nature for his good. The beginning of Na¬ 
ture coincides therefore with God only where her end 
coincides with man , or in other words, the doctrine that 
God is the creator of the world has its source and sense 
in the doctrine that man is the end of creation. If you 
feel ashamed of the belief that the world is created, 
made for man, then you must feel ashamed of the belief 
that it is created , made at all. Where it is written: 
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the 
earth,” there it is also written: “ God made two great 
lights. He made the stars also, and set them in the fir¬ 
mament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth , and 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


47 


to rule over the day and the nightP If you declare the 
belief in man as the end of Nature to be human pride, 
then you must also declare the belief in the creator of 
Nature to be human pride. That light only which 
shines on account of man is the light of theology, that 
light only which exists exclusively on account of the 
seeing being, presupposes also a seeing being as its cause. 

§ 44. The spiritual being which man places above 
Nature and presupposes as her founder and creator, is 
nothing but the spiritual essence of man himself ’ which, 
however, appears to him as another one, different from 
and incomparable to himself, because he makes it the 
cause of Nature , the cause of effects which man’s mind, 
will and intellect cannot produce, and because he conse¬ 
quently combines with that spiritual essence of man, the 
essence of Nature which is different. ( 15 ) It is the di¬ 
vine spirit who makes the grass grow, who forms the 
child in the womb, who holds and moves the sun in his 
course, who piles up the mountains, commands the winds, 
incloses the sea within its limits. What is the human mind 
compared with this spirit! How small, how limited, how 
vain ! If therefore the rationalist rejects God’s incarna¬ 
tion, the union of the divine and human nature, he does 
so particularly because the idea of God in his lieadA^<?s 
only the idea of Nature, especially of Nature such as she 
was disclosed to the human eye by the telescope of astron¬ 
omy. How should—thus he exclaims provoked—how 
should that great, infinite, universal being, which has its 
adequate representation and effect only in the great, in¬ 
finite universe, descend for man’s sake upon the earth, 
which certainly disappears into nothing before the im¬ 
measurable greatness and fullness of the universe? What 
unworthy, mean, “ human” imagination ! To concentrate 






48 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


God upon earth, to plunge God into man, is about the 
same as to try to condense the ocean into one drop, to 
reduce the ring of Saturn into a finger-ring. Truly it is 
a rather narrow idea to think the universal being as 
limited only to earth or man, and to believe that Nature 
exists only on his account, that the sun shines only on 
account of the human eye. You do not see, however, 
short-sighted rationalist, that it is not the idea of God, but 
the idea of Nature, which within yourself objects to a 
union of God and man, and shows it to be a nonsensical con¬ 
tradiction; you do not see that the centre of union,, ter- 
tium com/parationis, between God and man is not that 
being to which you directly or indirectly attribute the 
power and effects of Nature, but rather that being which 
sees and hears, because you see and hear, which possesses 
consciousness, intellect and will, because you possess 
these faculties, or, in other words, that being which you 
distinguish from Nature, because you distinguish your¬ 
self from her. What, then, can you really object if this 
being finally appears as a real man before your eyes? 
How can you reject the consequences if you adhere to 
the premises ? How can you deny the son if you ac¬ 
knowledge the father ? If the God-man to you is a creat¬ 
ure of human imagination and self-deification, then you 
must acknowledge, also, the creator of Nature to be a 
creature of human imagination and self-exaltation over 
Nature. If you wish for a being without any anthro¬ 
pomorphism, without any human additions, be they addi¬ 
tions of the intellect, or the heart, or of imagination, 
then be courageous and consistent enough to give up 
God altogether, and to appeal only to pure, naked, god¬ 
less nature as to the last basis of your existence. As 
long as you admit a difference , so long you incarnate 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


49 


in God your own difference, so long you incorporate 
your own essence and nature in the universal and 
primary being ; for as you do not have nor know in 
distinction from human nature any other being than 
Nature, so, on the other hand, you neither have nor 
know any other being in distinction from Nature than 
the human one. 

§ 45. The conception of man’s essence as an objective 
being different from man, or, in short, the personification 
of the human essence, has for its presupposition the in¬ 
carnation of the objective being which is different from 
man, i. e. the conception of Nature as of a human 
being. ( 16 ) Will and intellect therefore appear to man as 
the primary powers or causes of Nature only because the 
unintentional effects of Nature appear to him in the light 
of his intellect as intentional ones, as ends and purposes; 
Nature herself consequently as an intelligent being (or at 
least as a mere thing of intellect). As everything is seen 
by the sun—the God of the sun, “ Helios ” hears and sees 
everything—because man sees everything in the sunlight, 
sc everything in itself has been thought, because man 
thinks it; a work of intellect, because for him an object 
of his intellect. Because he measures the stars and their 
distances, they are measured; because he applies mathe¬ 
matics in order to understand Nature and her laws, they 
have also been applied to her production; because he 
sees the end of a certain motion, the result of a certain 
development, the function of a certain organ, this end, 
function or result is in itself a foreseen one ; because he 
can imagine the opposite of the position or direction of 
a heavenly body, nay even numberless other directions, 
while at the same time he perceives that if this direction 
were changed, also a series of fruitful, benevolent con- 


I 




50 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


sequences would be made impossible, so that he com 
siders this series of consequences as the motive of that 
very direction: therefore such direction has really and 
originally been selected with admirable wisdom, and 
only with regard to its benevolent consequences, from 
the multitude of other directions which also exist only 
in man’s head. Thus the principle of thinking is to man 
directly and without discrimination the principle of exist¬ 
ence ; the thing thought, the thing existing; the idea of 
the object, its essence, (the a posteriori the a prior i^) 
Man thinks Nature otherwise than she really is; no won¬ 
der that he also presupposes as her cause and the cause of 
her existence another Being than herself, a being which 
exists only in his mind, nay, which is even only the es¬ 
sence of his own mind. Man reverses the natural order 
of things; he founds the world in the very sense of the 
word upon its head, he makes the apex of the pyramid 
its basis—the first thing in or for the head, the reason 
why something is, the first thing in reality, the cause 
through which it exists. The motive of a thing precedes 
in the mind the thing itself. This is the reason why to 
man the essence of reason or intellect, the essence of 
thinking not only logically, but also physically, is the 
first, the primary being. 

§ 46. The mystery of teleology is based upon the con¬ 
tradiction between the necessity of Nature and the ar¬ 
bitrary will of man , between Nature such as she really 
is and such as man imagines her. If the earth were 
placed somewhere else, if e. g. it were placed where Mer¬ 
cury now is, everything would perish in consequence of 
insupportable heat. How wisely, therefore, is the earth 
placed just where it appears best according to its quality. 
But in what does this wisdom consist ? Only in the con- 


1 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


51 


tradiction, in the contrast to human folly , which arbi¬ 
trarily in thought places the earth somewhere else than 
where it is in reality. If you first tear asunder what in 
Nature is inseparable , as for instance the astronomical 
place of a heavenly body from its physical quality, then 
certainly the unity in Nature must afterwards appear 
to you as expediency , necessity as plan , the real and 
necessary place of a planet which agrees with its nature 
in contrast to the unfit one which you have thought of 
and chosen, as the reasonable one which has been justly 
chosen and wisely selected. “ If the snow had a black 
color, or if such color prevailed in the arctic regions, all 
the arctic countries of the earth would be a gloomy 
desert, unfit for organic life. Thus the arrangement of 
the colors of bodies oilers one of the most beautiful proofs 
for the wise arrangement of the world.” Certainly, if 
man did not change white into black , if human folly 
had not disposed arbitrarily of Nature, no divine wisdom 
would rule over Nature. 

§ 47. “ Who has told the bird that it has only to 

raise its tail if it wants to fly downward, or to depress it, 
if it wants to ascend ? He must be perfectly blind, who, 
in observing the flight of birds, does not perceive any 
higher wisdom that has thought in their steadP Cer¬ 
tainly he must be blind, not for Nature, but for man, 
who makes his nature the original of Nature, th % power 
of intellect the original power , who makes the birds’ 
flight dependent upon the insight into the mechanical 
laws of flying, and who elevates his ideas abstracted from 
Nature into laws which the birds apply to their flight, 
just as the rider applies the rules of the art of riding, or 
the swimmer the rules of the art of swimming; with the 
only dilferen^e that to the birds the application of the 





52 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


art of flying is created with them. But the flight of birds 
is founded on no art. Art is only where also the oppo¬ 
site of art is to be found, where an organ performs a 
function which is not directly and necessarily connected 
with it, which does not exhaust its essence, and is only a 
particular junction by the side of many other real or 
possible functions of the same organ. But the bird can¬ 
not fly otherwise than it does, nor is it at liberty not to 
fly; it must fly. The animal always knows how to do 
only that which it is able to do, and for this very reason 
it can do this one thing so perfectly, so masterly, so un- 
surpassably, because it does not know anything else, be¬ 
cause its power is exhausted in this one function, because 
this one function is identical with its nature. If we 
therefore are unable to explain the actions and functions 
of the animals, especially those of the lower ones, which 
are endowed witli certain artistic impulses, without pre¬ 
supposition of an intellect which has thought in their 
stead, this is only because we think that* the objects of 
their activity are objects to them in the same manner as 
they are objects to our consciousness and intellect. As 
soon as we consider the works of the animals as work of 
art , as arbitrary works , we must necessarily also con¬ 
sider the intellect as their cause, for a work of art pre¬ 
supposes choice, intention, intellect, and consequently, as 
we know by experience that animals do not think them¬ 
selves, another being as thinking in their behalf. ( 17 ) 
“ Do you know how to advise the spider how it is to 
carry and to fasten the threads from one tree to another, 
from one housetop to another, from a height this side of the 
water to another one on the other side?” Certainly not; 
but do you indeed believe that there is any advice needed 
in this instance, that the spider is in the same condition 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


53 


in which yon would be, if you were to solve this problem 
theoretically, that for it, as well as for you, there is any 
difference between “ this side” and “ that side?” Between 
the spider and the object to which it fastens the threads 
of its net, there is as necessary a connection as between 
your bone and muscle; for the object without it is for 
it nothing but the support of its thread of life, as the 
support of its fangs. The spider does not see what you 
see; all the separations, differences and distances which, 
or at least such as your intellectual eye perceives them, 
do not at all exist for it. What therefore to you is an 
insolvable theoretical problem, that is done by the spider 
without any intellect, and consequently without all 
those difficulties which exist only for your intellect. 
“Who has told the vine-fretters that they find their 
food in the fall of the year in greater abundance at the 
branch and at the bud than at the leaf? Who has shown 
them the way to the bud and to the branch? For the 
vine-fretter which was born upon the leaf, the bud is not 
only a distant but an entirely unknown province. I 
adore the creator of the vine-fretter and of the cochineal 
and remain silent.” Certainly you must be Silent if you 
make the vine-fretters and cochineals preachers of 
Theism, if you endow them with your thoughts, for only 
to the vine-fretter viewed from the standpoint of man 
is the bud a distant and unknown province, but not 
to the vine-fretter itself, to which the leaf and the bud 
are objects not as such, but only as matter which can be 
assimilated and is chemically related to it. It is there¬ 
fore only the reflex of your eye which shows you Nature 
as the work of an eye, which obliges you to derive the 
threads the spider draws from its hind part, from the 
head of a thinking being. Nature is for you only a 



54 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


spectacle, a delight of the eye; therefore you think that 
what delights your eye, also rules and moves Nature. 
Thus you make the heavenly light in which she appears 
to you, the heavenly being which has created her; the 
rays of the eye the lever of Nature ; the optic nerve the 
motory nerve of the universe. To derive Nature from a 
wise creator is to produce children with a look; to sat¬ 
isfy hunger with the perfume of food; to move rocks by 
the harmony of sounds. If the Greenlander derives the 
shark’s origin from human urine because it smells to 
man like it, this zoological genesis has the same founda¬ 
tion as as the cosmological genesis of the Theist, when 
he derives Nature from intellect, because she makes upon 
man the impression of intellect, and intention. Certainly 
the manifestation of Nature for us is reason, but the 
cause of such manifestation is as little reason as the cause 
of light is light. 

§48. Why does Nature produce monsters? Because 
the result of a formation to her is not the object of a pre¬ 
existing purpose. Why supernumerary limbs ? Because 
she does not number. Why does she place at the left 
hand side what generally lies on the right hand side, and 
vice versa ? Because she does not know what is right or 
left. Monsters are therefore popular arguments, which 
for this very reason have been insisted on already by the 
Atheists of old, and even by such Theists as emancipated 
Nature from the guardianship of theology, in order to 
prove that the productions of Nature are unforeseen, 
unintentional, involuntary ones; for all reasons which 
are adduced for the sake of explaining monsters, even 
those of the most modern naturalists, according to which 
they are only consequences of diseases of the foetus, 
would be done away with, if with the creative or pro- 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


55 


ductive power of Nature at the same time will, intellect, 
forethought and consciousness were connected. But 
although Nature does not see, she is not therefore blind; 
although she does not live (in the sense of human, that 
is subjective, sensible life) she is not dead; and although 
she does not produce according to purposes, still her 
productions are not accidental ones; for where man de¬ 
fines Nature as dead and blind, and her productions as 
accidental ones, he defines her only so in contrast to him¬ 
self ’, and declares her to be deficient because she does not 
possess what he possesses. Nature works and produces 
everywhere only in and with connection —a connection 
which is reason for man, for wherever he perceives con¬ 
nection, he finds sense, material for the thinking, “ suf¬ 
ficient reason,” system—only from and with necessity. 
But also the necessity of Nature is no human, i. e. no 
logical, metaphysical or mathematical, in general no ab¬ 
stracted one; for natural beings are no creatures of 
thought, no logical or mathematical figures, but real, 
sensual, individual beings ; it is a sensual necessity and 
therefore eccentric, exceptional, irregular, which, in con¬ 
sequence of these anomalies of human imagination, ap¬ 
pears even as freedom, or at least as a product of free will. 
Nature generally can be understood only through herself; 
she is that being whose idea depends on no other being; she 
alone admits of a discrimination between what a thing is 
in itself and what it is for our conception; she alone 
cannot be measured with any human measure , although 
we compare and designate her manifestations with analo¬ 
gous human manifestations in order to make them intelligi¬ 
ble for us, and although in general we apply, and are obliged 
to apply to her, human expressions and ideas, such as 
order, purpose, in accordance with the nature of our 




56 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


language, which is founded only upon the subjective ap¬ 
pearance of things. 

§. 49. The religious admiration of divine wisdom in 
Nature is only an incident of enthusiasm ; it refers only 
to the means , but is extinguished in reflecting on the 
purposes of Nature. How wonderful is the spider’s web, 
how wonderful the funnel of the ant-lion in the sand ! 
But what is the purpose of these wise arrangements ? No- 
thing but nourishment—a purpose which man in regard 
to himself degrades to a mere means. “ Others,” said 
Socrates—but these others are animals and brutish men— 
“ others live in order to eat, but I eat in order to live.” 
How magnificent is the flower, how admirable its struc¬ 
ture ! But what is the purpose of this structure, of this 
magnificence ? Only to magnify and protect the genitals 
which man in himself either hides from shame, or even 
mutilates from religious zeal. “ The creator of the 
vin'efr etter s and of the cochineals ” whom the naturalist, 
the man of theory adores and admires, who has only 
natural life for his purpose, is therefore not the God and 
creator in the sense of religion. No! only the creator of 
man, and that of man such as he distinguishes himself 
from Nature, and rises above Nature, the creator in 
whom man has the consciousness of himself ’ in whom 
he finds represented the qualities which constitute his 
nature in distinction from external Nature, and that in 
such a manner as he imagines them in religion , is the 
God and creator such as he is an object of religion. 

“ The water” says Luther, “ which is used in baptism 
and poured over the child is also water not of the crea¬ 
tor but of God the /Saviour .” Natural water I have in 
common witli animals and plants, but not the water of 
baptism ; the former amalgamates me with the other nat- 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION". 


57 


ural beings, the latter distinguishes me from them. But 
the object of religion is not natural water, but the water 
ot baptism; consequently not the creator or author of 
natural, but of baptismal water is an object of religion. 
The creator of natural water is necessarily himself a nat¬ 
ural, and therefore no religious, i. e. supernatural being. 
Water is a visible being, whose qualities and effects there¬ 
fore do not lead us to a sup er natural cause ; but the 
baptismal water is no object for the corporeal eye, it is 
a spiritual, invisible, supersensuous being, i. e. one that 
exists and works only for faith, in thought, in imagina- 
tion—a being which therefore requires also for its cause 
a spiritual being that exists only in faith and imagination. 
Natural water cleanses me only of my physical, but 
baptism ad water of my moral impurities and diseases; 
the former only quenches my thirst for this temporal, 
transient life, but the latter satisfies my desire for life 
eternal; the former has only limited, defined, finite ef¬ 
fects, but the latter infinite, all-powerful effects which 
surpass the nature of water, and which therefore repre¬ 
sent and show the nature of. the divine being, which is 
bound by no limit of Nature, the unlimited essence of 
man’s power to believe and to imagine, bound to no limit 
of experience and reason. But is not also the creator of 
baptismal w^ater the creator of natural water ? In what re¬ 
lation therefore does the former stand to the latter ? In the 
very same as baptismal to natural water; the former can¬ 
not exist if the latter does not exist; this one is the con¬ 
dition, the means of that one. Thus the creator of Na¬ 
ture is only the condition for the creator of man. How 
can he who does not hold the natural water in his hand 
combine with it supernatural effects ? How can he who 
does not rule over temporal life give life eternal ? How 


58 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


can he whom the elements of Nature do not obey, 
restore my body turned to dust ? But wdio is the master 
and ruler of Nature unless it be he who had power and 
strength to produce her from naught by his mere will ? 
He, therefore, who declares the union of the supernatural 
essence of baptism with natural water a contradiction, 
without sense, may also declare the union of the super¬ 
natural essence of the creator wkh Nature such a con¬ 
tradiction ; for between the effects of baptismal and com¬ 
mon water is just as much or as little connection as 
between the supernatural creator and natural Nature. 
The creator comes from the same source from which the 
supernatural, wonderful wate» of baptism gushes forth. 
In the baptismal water we see only the essence of the 
creator, of God, in a sensible illustration. How there¬ 
fore can you reject the miracle of baptism and other 
miracles, if you admit the essence of the creator, i. e. the 
essence of the miracle ? Or in other words: how can you 
reject the small miracle if you admit the great miracle 
of creation ? But it is in the world of theology just as in 
the political world; the small thieves are hanged, the 
great ones are suffered to escape. 

§ 50. That providence which is manifested in the 
order, conformity to purpose and lawfulness of Na¬ 
ture, is not the providence of religion. The latter is 
based upon liberty, the former upon necessity; the latter 
is unlimited and unconditional, the former limited, de 
pending on a thousand different conditions; the latter is 
a special and individual one, the former is extended only 
over the whole, the species, while the individual is left 
to chance. A theistic naturalist says: “ Many (or rather 
all those in whose conception God was more than the 
mathematical, imagined origin of Nature) have imagined 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


59 


the preservation of the world and especially of mankind 
as direct and special , as if God ruled the actions of all 
creatures, and led them according to his pleasure. But 
after the consideration of the natural laws, we are unable 
to admit such a special government and superintendence 
over the actions of men and other creatures. . .We learn 
this from the little care which Mature takes of single 
individuals. ( 1 ^) Thousands of them are sacrificed with¬ 
out hesitation or repentance in the plenty of Nature. . . 
Even with regard to man we make the same experience. 
Not one half of the human race reach the second year of 
their age, hut die almost without having known that 
they ever lived. We learn this very thing also from the 
misfortunes and mishaps of all men, the good as well as 
the bad, which cannot well be made to agree with the 
special preservation or co-operation of the creator.” 

But a government, a providence which is no special 
one, does not answer to the purpose, the essence, the idea 
of providence; for providence is to destroy accident, but 
just that is upheld by a merely general providence which 
therefore is no better than no providence at all. Thus, 
e. g. it is a “law of divine order in Nature,” i. e. a conse¬ 
quence of natural causes, that according to the number of 
years also the death of man occurs in a definite ratio ; that 
for instance, in the first year one child dies out of from 
three to four children, in the fifth year one out of twenty- 
five, in the seventh one out of fifty, in the tenth one out 
of one hundred, but still it is accidental, not regulated by 
this law, depending on other accidental causes, that just 
this one child dies, while those three or four others sur¬ 
vive. Thus marriage is an “institution of God,” a law 
of natural providence, in order to multiply the human 
race, and consequently a duty for me. But whether I 


60 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


am to marry just this one , whether she is not perhaps in 
consequence of an accidental organic deficiency unfit or 
unproductive, that I am not told. But just because 
natural providence, which in reality is nothing but 
Nature herself, does not come to my assistance when I 
come to apply the law to the special, single case, but 
leaves me to myself just in the critical moment of decis¬ 
ion, in the pressure of necessity; I appeal from her to a 
higher court, to the supernatural providence of the 
Gods whose eye shines upon me just where Nature’s 
light is extinguished; whose rule begins just where that 
of natural providence is at an end. The Gods know and 
tell me, they decide what Nature leaves in the darkness 
of ignorance and gives up to accident. The region of 
what commonly, as well as philosophically, is called ac¬ 
cidental, “positive,” individual, not to be foreseen, not 
to be speculated upon, is the region of the Gods, the 
region of religious providence. And oracles and prayer 
are the religious means by which man makes the acci¬ 
dental, obscure, uncertain, an object of certainty, or at 
least of hope. ( 19 ) 

§ 51. The Gods, says Epicurus, exist in the intervals 
of the universe. Very well; they exist only in the void 
space, in the abyss which is between the world of imagi¬ 
nation and the world of reality, between the law and its 
application, between the action and its result, between 
the present and the future. The Gods are imagined 
beings, beings of imagination which therefore owe also 
their existence, strictly speaking, not to the present but 
only to the future and the past. Those Gods who owe 
their existence to the past, are those who no longer exist , 
the dead ones , those beings which live only in mind and 
imagination, whose worship among some nations consti- 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


61 


tutes the whole religion, and with most of them an im¬ 
portant essential part of religion. But far more might¬ 
ily than by the past, is the mind influenced by the future; 
the former leaves behind only the quiet perception of re¬ 
membrance, while the latter stands before us with the ter¬ 
rors of hell or the happiness of heaven. The Gods which 
rise from the tombs are therefore themselves only shades 
of Gods; the true living Gods, the rulers over rain and 
sunshine, lightning and thunder, life and death, heaven 
and hell, owe their existence likewise only to the powers 
of fear and hope, which rule over life and death, and 
which illuminate the dark abyss of the future with beings 
of the imagination. The present is exceedingly prosaic, 
ready made, determined, never to be changed, final, ex¬ 
clusive ; in the present, imagination coincides with real¬ 
ity ; in it therefore there is no place for the Gods; the 
present is godless. But the future is the empire of 
poetry, of unlimited possibility and accident—the future 
may be according to my wishes or fears; it is not yet 
subject to the stern lot of unchangeableness; it still 
hovers between existence and non-existence, high over 
“ common ” reality and palpability; it still belongs to 
another “ invisible ” world which is not put in motion 
by the laws of gravitation, but only by the sensory 
nerves. This world is the world of the Gods. Mine is 
the present, but the future belongs to the Gods. I am 
now; this present moment, although it will immediately 
be past, cannot be taken any more from me by the 
Gods; things that have happened cannot be undone 
even by divine power, as the ancients have already said. 
But shall I exist the next moment ? Does the next mo¬ 
ment of my life depend on my will , or is it in any neces¬ 
sary connection with the present one ? No ; a number- 


62 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


less multitude of accidents; the ground under my feet, 
the ceiling over my head, a flash of lightning, a bullet, 
a stone, even a grape which glides into my windpipe in¬ 
stead of passing into the aesophagus, can at any moment 
tear forever the coming moment from the present one. 
But the good Gods prevent this violent breach; they 
fill with their external, invulnerable bodies, the pores of 
the human body which are accessible to all possible de¬ 
structive influences; they attach the coming moment 
to the one that is past; they unite the future with the 
present ; they are, and possess in uninterrupted con¬ 
tinuity, what men—the porous Gods—are and possess, 
only in intervals and with interruptions. 

§ 52. Goodness is an essential quality with the Gods ; 
but how can they be good if they are not almighty and 
free from the laws of natural providence, i. e. from the 
fetters of natural necessity, if they do not appear in the 
individual instances which decide between life and 
death, as masters of nature , but friends and benefac¬ 
tors of men, and if they consequently do not work any 
miracles f The Gods, or rather Nature, has endowed man 
with physical and mental powers in order to be able to 
sustain himself. But are these natural means of sustain¬ 
ing himself always sufficient ? Do I not frequently come 
into situations where I am lost without hope if no super¬ 
natural hand stops the inexorable course of natural order % 
The natural order is good, but is it always good ? This 
continuous rain or drought e. g. is entirely in order; but 
must not I or my family, or even a whole nation perish 
in consequence of it, unless the Gods give their aid and 
stop it ? ( 20 ) Miracles therefore are inseparable from 
the divine government and providence; nay, they are the 
only proofs, manifestations and revelations of the Gods, 


THE ESSENCE OE RELIGION. 


63 


as of powers and beings distinguished from Nature ; to 
deny the miracles is to deny the Gods themselves. By 
what are Gods distinguished from men ? Only by their 
being without limits, what the latter are in a limited 
manner , and especially by their being always what the 
latter are only for a certain time , for a moment. ( 21 ) 
Men live—living existence is divinity, essential quality 
and primary condition of the Deity—but alas ! not for 
ever; they die—but the Gods are the immortal ones 
who always live; men are also happy, but not without 
interruption as the Gods; men are also good but not 
always , and just this constitutes according to Socrates 
the difference between Deity and humanity, that the 
former is always good; according to Aristotle, men 
also enjoy the divine happiness of thinking, but their 
mental activity is interrupted by other functions and 
actions. Thus the Gods and men have the same quali¬ 
ties and rules of life, only that the former possess them 
without, the latter with limitations and exceptions. As 
the hfe to come is nothing but the continuation of this 
life uninterrupted by death , so the divine being is no¬ 
thing but the continuation of the human being uninter¬ 
rupted by Nature in general—the uninterrupted , un¬ 
limited nature of man. But how are miracles distin¬ 
guished from the effects of Nature ? Just as the Gods are 
distinguished from men. The miracle makes an effect 
or a quality of Nature which in a given case is not good, 
a good or at least a harmless one; it causes that I do not 
sink and drown in the water, if I have the misfortune of 
falling into it; that fire does not burn me; that a stone, 
falling upon my head, does not kill me—in short, it 
makes that essence which now is beneficent, then de¬ 
structive, now philanthropic, then misanthropic, an essence 


64 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


always good. The Gods and miracles owe their exist¬ 
ence only to the exceptions of the rule. The Deity is 
the destruction of the deficiencies and weaknesses in man 
which are the very causes of the exceptions; the miracle 
is the destruction of the deficiencies and limits in Nature. 
The natural beings are defined and consequently limited 
beings. This limit of theirs is in some abnormal cases 
the cause of their injuriousness to man ; but in the sense 
of religion it is not a necessary one, but an arbitrary one, 
made by God and therefore to be destroyed if necessity, 
i. e. the welfare of man requires it.—To deny the mir¬ 
acles under the pretext that they are not becoming to 
God’s dignity and wisdom in virtue of which he has fixed 
and determined everything from the beginning in the 
best manner, is to sacrifice man to Nature, religion to 
intellect , is to preach Atheism in the name of God. A 
God who fulfills only such prayers and wishes of men as 
can be fulfilled also without him , the fulfillment of which 
is within the limits and conditions of natural causes , 
who therefore helps only as long as art and Nature help, 
but who ceases helping as soon as the materia medica is 
at an end—such a God is nothing but the personified ne¬ 
cessity of Nature hidden behind the name of God. 

§ 53. The belief in God is either the belief in Nature 
(the objective being) as a human (subjective) being, or 
the belief in the human essence as the essence of Nature. 
The former is tlie natural religion, polytheism, ( 22 ) this 
one spiritual or human religion, monotheism. The poly¬ 
theist sacrifices himself to Nature, he gives to the human 
eye and heart the power and government over Nature ; 
the polytheist makes the human being dependent on 
Nature, the monotheist makes Nature dependent on the 
human being; the former says: if Nature does not 


The essence of religion. 


65 


exist, I do not exist ; but the latter says vice versa: if 
I do not exist, the world, Nature does not exist. The 
first principle of religion is : lam nothing compared with 
Nature, everything compared with m,e is God ; every¬ 
thing inspires me with the feeling of dependence ; every¬ 
thing can bring me, although only accidentally, fortune 
and misfortune, welfare and destruction, (but man origin¬ 
ally does not distinguish between cause and accidental 
motive); therefore everything is a motive of religion. 
Religion on the stand-point of such non-critical feeling 
of dependence is fetishism so-called, the basis of poly¬ 
theism. But the conclusion of religion is : everything is 
nothing compared with me —all the magnificence of the 
stars, the supreme Gods of polytheism disappear before 
the magnificence of the human soul; all the power of 
the world before the power of the human heart; all the 
necessity of dead unconscious Nature, before the neces¬ 
sity of the human, conscious being; for everything is 
only a means for me. But Nature would not exist for 
me, if she existed by herself, if she were not from God. 
If she were by herself and therefore had the cause 
of her existence in herself, she would for this very 
reason have also an independent essence, an original 
existence and essence without any relation to myself, 
and independent from me. The signification of Nature, 
according to which she appears to be nothing for 
herself, but only a means for man, is therefore to 
be traced back only to creation ; but this signification is 
manifested above all in those instances where man—as 
e. g. in distress, in danger of death—comes into collision 
with Nature, which however is sacrificed to man’s wel¬ 
fare— in the miracles. Therefore the premiss of the 
miracle is creation ; the miracle is the conclusion, the 


66 


THE ESSENCE OP RELIGION. 


consequence , the truth of creation. Creation is in the 
same relation to the miracle, as the species to the single 
individual; the miracle is the act of creation in a 
special , single case. Or, creation is theory ; its practice 
and application is the miracle. God is the cause , man 
the end of the world i.e. God is the first being in theory , 
but man is the first being m practice. Natureis nothing 
for God—nothing but a plaything of his power—but 
only in order that in an exigency, or rather generally, she 
is and can do nothing against man. In the creator man 
drops the limits of his essence, of his “ soul,” in the mira¬ 
cle the limits of his existence, of his body; there he makes 
his invisible, thinking and reflected essence, here his in¬ 
dividual, practical, visible essence, the essence of the 
world; then he legitimates the miracle; here he only per¬ 
forms it. The miracle accomplishes the end of religion 
in a sensual, popular way—the dominion of man over Na 
ture, the divinity of man becomes a palpable truth. 
God works miracles, but upon man’s prayer and although 
not upon an especial prayer, still in man’s sense , in agree¬ 
ment with his most secret innermost wishes. Sarah 
laughed when in her old age the Lord promised her a 
little son, but nevertheless even then descendants were 
still her highest thought and wish. The secret worker of 
miracles therefore is man, but in the progress of time— 
time discloses every secret—he will and must become the 
manifest , visible worker of miracles. At first man re¬ 
ceives miracles, finally he works miracles himself; at first 
he is the object of God, finally God himself at first God 
only in heart, in mind, in thought, finally, God in flesh. 
But thought is bashful, sensuality without shame; thought 
is silent and reserved, sensuality speaks out openly and 
frankly; its utterances therefore are exposed to be ridi- 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


67 


•culed if they are contradictory to reason, because here 
the contradiction is a visible, undeniable one. This is 
the reason why the modern rationalists are ashamed to 
believe in the God in the fleshy, e ., in the sensual, risible 
miracle, while they are not ashamed to believe in the 
not-sensual God, i. e. in the not sensual, hidden miracle. 
Still the time will come when the prophecy of Lichten¬ 
berg will be fulfilled, and the belief in God in general, 
consequently also the belief in a rational God will be con¬ 
sidered as superstition just as well a? already the belief 
in the miraculous Christian God m flesh is considered as 
superstition,'and when therefore instead of the church light 
of simple belief and instead of the twilight of rational¬ 
istic belief, the pure ligft of Nature and reason will en¬ 
lighten and warm mankind. 

§ 54. He who his God has no other material than 
that which natural science, philosophy, or natural obser¬ 
vation generally furnishes to him, who therefore con¬ 
strues the idea of God from natural materials and con¬ 
siders hhn to be nothing but the cause or the principle 
of tko laws of astronomy, natural philosophy, geol¬ 
ogy, mineralogy, physiology, zoology and anthropology, 
ought to be honest enough also to abstain from using the 
name of God, for a natural principle is always a nat¬ 
ural essence and not what constitutes the idea of a God . 
( 23 ) As little as a church which has been turned into a 
museum of natural curiosities, still is and can be called 
a house of God, so little is a God really a God, whose 
nature and efforts are only manifested in astronomical, 
geological, anthropological works; God is a religious word , 
a religious object and being , not & physical, astronomi¬ 
cal, or in general a cosmical one. “ Deus et cultus ’’says 
Luther in his table-discourses, “ sunt relativ a ,” God 


68 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


and worship corresjoond to one another , one cannot be 
without the other , for God must ever be the God of a 
mun or of a nation and is always in praedicamento 
relationis , both being in mutual relation to each other. 
God will have some who adore and worship him; for to 
have a God and to adore him correspond to each other, 
sunt relative x, as man and wife in marriage—neither 
can be without the other.” God therefore presupposes 
men who adore a^id worship him; God is a being the 
idea or conception c?f whom does not depend on Nature 
but on man, and that £>n religious man; an object of 
• adoration is not without an adoring being, i. e. God is 
an object whose existence coincides with the existence of 
religion, whose essence coincici^s with the essence of 
religion, and which therefore does not exist apart from 
religion , different and independent fr'pm it , but in whom 
objectively is contained no more than wil ia t religion con¬ 
tains subjectively. ( 24 ) Sound is the objective essence , 
the God of the ear; light is the objective essence, the 
God of the eye; sound exists only for the ear, lig’ht only 
for the eye; in the ear we have what we have in sojmd : 
trembling, waving bodies, extended membranes, gelatin¬ 
ous substances; but in the eye we have organs of light. 
To make God an object of natural philosophy, astronomy 
or zoology, is therefore just the same thing as making 
sound an object of the eye. As the tone exists only in 
the ear and for it, so God exists only in religion and for 
it, only in faith and for it. As sound or tone as the 
object of hearing expresses only the nature of the ear, so 
God as an object which is only the object of religion 
and faith, expresses the nature of religion and faith. But 
what makes an object a religious one? As we have 
seen, only man’s imagination and mind. Whether you 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


69 


worship Jehovah or Apis, the thunder or the Christ, your 
shadow, like the negro on the coast of Guinea, or your 
soul like the Persian of old, the flatus ventris or your 
genius—in short, whether you worship a sensual or spirit¬ 
ual being, it is all the same; something is an object of 
religion only in so far as it is an object of imagination 
and feeling, an object of faith ; for just because the object 
of religion, such as it is its object, does not exist in real¬ 
ity, but rather contradicts the latter, for this very reason 
it is only an object of faith. Thus e. g . the immortality 
of man, or man as an immortal being is an object of re¬ 
ligion, but for this very reason only an object of faith, 
for reality shows just the contrary, the mortality of man. 
To believe, means to imagine that something exists which 
does not exist; e. g. to imagine that a certain picture is 
a living being, that this bread is flesh, wine blood, i. e ., 
something which it is not. Therefore it betrays the 
greatest ignorance of religion if you hope to find God 
with the telescope in the sky of astronomy, or with a 
magnifying glass in a botanical garden, or with a miner- 
alogic hammer in the mines of geology, or with the ana¬ 
tomic knife and microscope in the entrails of animals and 
men—you find him only in man’s faith, imagination and 
heart; for God himself is nothing but the essence ot 
man’s imagination and heart. 

§ 55. “As your heart, so is your God.” As the 
wishes of men , so are their Gods. The Greeks had 
limited Gods —that means: they had limited wishes . 
The Greeks did not wish to live forever, they only 
wished not to grow old and die, and they did not ab¬ 
solutely wish not to die, they only wished not to die 
now — unpleasant things always come too soon for 
man —only not in the bloom of their age, only not of a 


70 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


violent, painful death ; ( 25 ) they did not wish to be saved 
in heaven, only happy, only to live without trouble and 
pain; they did not sigh as the Christians do, because 
they were subject to the necessity of Nature, to the wants 
of sexual instinct, of sleep, of eating and drinking; they 
still submitted in their wishes to the limits of human na¬ 
ture ; they were not yet creators from nothing, they did 
not yet make wine from water, they only purified and 
distilled the water of Nature and changed it in an or¬ 
ganic way into the blood of the Gods; they drew the 
contents of divine and blissful life not from mere imagi¬ 
nation, but from the materials of the real world; they 
built the heaven of the Gods upon the ground of this 
earth. The Greeks did not make the divine, i. e. the 
possible being, the original and end of the real one, but 
they made the real being the measure of the possible 
one. Even when they had refined and spiritualized 
their Gods by means of philosophy, their wishes were 
founded upon the ground of reality and human nature.. 
The Gods are realized wishes; but the highest wish, the 
highest bliss of the philosopher, of the thinker as such,, 
is to think undisturbed. The Gods of the Greek philos¬ 
opher—at least of the Greek philosopher par excellence, 
of the philosophical Jove, of Aristotle—are therefore un¬ 
disturbed thinkers; their happiness, their divinity, con¬ 
sists in the uninterrupted activity of thinking. But this 
activity, this happiness is itself a happiness, real within 
this world, within human nature—although here limited 
by interruptions—a defined, special, and therefore, in 
the conception of Christians, limited and poor happiness 
which is contradictory to the essence of true happiness ; 
for Christians have no limited but an unlimited God, sur¬ 
passing all natural necessity, superhuman, extramundane,. 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 71 

transcendental, i. c. tliey have unlimited, transcendental 
wishes which go beyond the world, beyond Nature, beyond 
the essence of man — i. e. absolutely fantastic icishes. 
Christians wish to be infinitely greater and happier 
than the Gods of the Olympus; their wish is a heaven 
in which all limits and all necessity of Nature are de¬ 
stroyed and all icishes are accomplished; ( 26 ) a heaven 
in which there exist no wants, no sufferings, no icounds, 
no struggles, no passions, no disturbances, no change 
of day and night, light and shade, joy and pain, as 
in the heaven of the Greeks. In short the object of their 
belief is no longer a limited, defined God, a God with 
the determined name of Jove, or Pluto, or Vulcan, but 
God without appellation, because the object of their 
wishes is not a named, finite, earthly happiness, a deter¬ 
mined enjoyment, such as the enjoyment of love, or of 
beautiful music, or of moral liberty, or of thinking, but 
an enjoyment which embraces all enjoyments, yet which 
for this very reason is a transcendental one, surpassing all 
ideas and thoughts, the enjoyment of an infinite, unlim¬ 
ited, unspeakable, indescribable happiness. Happiness 
and divinity are the same thing. Happiness as an object 
of belief, of imagination, generally as a theoretical object, 
is the Deity, the deity as an object of the heart, of the 
will, ( 2T ) of the wish as a practical object generally, is 
happiness. Or rather, the deity is an idea the truth and 
reality of which is only happiness. As far as the desire 
of happiness goes, so far, and no further, goes the idea of 
the deity. He who no longer has any supernatural 
wishes, has no longer any supernatural beings either. 


72 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


(1) The theme of this treatise, or at least its starting point, is Religion, inas¬ 
much as its object is Nature , which I was obliged to disregard in my “Essence of 
Christianity,” since the centre of Christianity is not God in Nature, but God in 
man.— [Author’s note]. 

(2) Nature, according to my conception, is nothing but a general word for 
denoting those beings, things and objects which man distinguishes from himself 
and his productions, and which he embraces under the common name of “Na¬ 
ture,” but by no means a general being , abstracted and separated from the real 
objects and then personified into a mystical existence. 

(3) All those qualities which originally are derived only from the contempla¬ 
tion of Nature, become in later times abstract, metaphysical qualities, just as 
Nature herself becomes an abstraction or creation of human reason. On this 
later standpoint, where man forgets the origin of God in Nature, when God no 
longer is an object of the senses, but an imaginary being, we must say : God 
without human qualities, who is to be distinguished from the properly human 
God, is nothing but the essence of reason. So much as regards tbe relation 
between this work and my former ones “ Luther ” and “ The Essence of Christi¬ 
anity.” 

(4) This may be true in a logical sense, but never as far as the real genesis is 
concerned. 

(5) It is self-evident that I do not intend to finally dispose in these few words of 
the great problem of the origin of organic life; but they are sufficient for my 
argument, as I give here only the indirect proof that life cannot have any other 
source but Nature. As regards the direct proofs of natural science, we are still 
far from the end, but in comparison with former times—especially in consequence 
of .the lately proved identity of organic and inorganic phenomena—at least far 
enough to be able to be convinced of the natural origin of life, although the man¬ 
ner of this origin is yet unknown to us, or even if it never should be revealed 
unto us. 

(6) Under this head we may also mention the many rules of etiquette which the 
ancient religions lay upon man in his intercourse with Nature, in order not to 
pollute or to violate her. Thus, e g. no worshiper of Ormuzd was permitted to 
tread barefoot on the ground, because earth was sacred; no Greek was allowed 
to ford a river with unwashed hands. 

(7) The expression for to wish is in the ancient German language the same as 
that for to “ enchant .” 

(8) The Gods are blissful beings. The blessing is the result, the fruit, the end 
of an action which is independent from, but desired by me. “To bless” says Lu¬ 
ther, “means to wish some thing good." “If we bless, we do nothing else but to 
wish something good, but we cannot give what we wish ; but God's blessing sounds 
fulfillment and soon proves its effect.” That means : men are desiring beings ; 
the Gods are those beings which fulfill the desire. Thus even in common life the 
word God, so frequently used is nothing but the expression of a wish. “ May God 
grant you children I” That means : I wish you children, with the only difference 
that the latter expression contains the wish as a subjective, not religious one, 
while the former implies it as an objective religious one. 

* 

(9) Thus in uncultivated times and among uncivilized nations religion may be a 
means of civilization, but in times of civilization religion represents the cause of 
rudeness, of antiquity, and is hostile to education. 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


73 


(10) Under this head we may also consider'the adoration of pernicious animals. 

(11) Hesiod.expressly says; also pheme (i. e ., fame, rumor, public opinion) is a 
deity. 

(12) The original kings, however, are well to be distinguished from the legiti 
mate ones, so-called. The latter, except in some extraordinary instances, are 
ordinary individuals, insignificant in themselves, while the former were extraor¬ 
dinary, distinguished, historical individuals. The deification of distinguished 
men, especially after their death, forms therefore the most natural transition 
from the properly naturalistic religions to the mythological and anthropological 
ones, although it may also take place at the same time with natural adoration. 
The worshiping of distinguished men, however, is by no means confined to fab¬ 
ulous times. Thus the Swedes deified their king Erich at the time of Christianity 
and sacrificed unto him after his death. 

(13) I range here the Greeks with the Israelites, while in my “Essence of 
Christianity” I contrast them with each other. This is by no means a logical con¬ 
tradiction, for things which, when compared with one another are different, coin¬ 
cide in comparison with a tnird thing. Besides, enjoyment of Nature includes also 
her aesthetic , theoretical enjoyment. 

(14) An ecclesiastical writer expressively calls man “ the tie of all things ” 
{syndesmon hapantori), because God in him wished to embrace the universe into a 
unity, and because, therefore, in him all things as in their end are combined, and 
result in his advantage. And certainly man, as Nature’s individualized essence, 
is her conclusion, but not in the anti-natural and supernatural sense of teleology 
and theology. 

(15) This union, or the amalgamation of the “moral” and “ physical ” of the 
human and not human being, produces a third, which is neither Nature nor man, 
hut which participates of both, like an amphibial, and which, for this very mystery 
of its nature, is the fdol of mysticism and speculation. 

(16) Viewed from this standpoint the creator of Nature is therefore nothing but 
the essence of Nature, which, by means of abstracting from Nature, has been dis¬ 
tinguished and abstracted from Nature, and such as she is an object of the senses 
and by the power of imagination has been changed into a human or man-like 
being, and thus popularized, anthropomorphized, personified. 

(17) Thus, generally, in all syllogisms from Nature to a God, the antecedent, 
the presupposition is a human one; no wonder therefore that their result is a human 
being or being similar to man. If the world is a machine there must necessarily be 
an architect. If the natural beings are as indifferent toward one another as the 
human individuals which can be employed and united only by means of higher 
power for any arbitrary purpose of state, as for instance war, there must natu¬ 
rally also be a ruler, a governor, a chief general of nature—a captain of the clouds 
—if she shall not be dissolved into nothing. Thus man first makes Nature un¬ 
consciously a human work , i, e. he makes his essence her fundamental essence, 
but as he afterwards or at the same time perceives the difference between the 
works of Nature and those of human art, his own essence appears to him as an¬ 
other, but analogous, similar one. All arguments for God’s existence have there¬ 
fore only a logical or rather anthropological signification, since also the logical 
forms are forms of human nature. 

(18) Nature however “cares’’ just as little for the species or genus. The 
latter is preserved because it is nothing but the totality of the individuals which 


74 


THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


by coition propagate and multiply themselves. While single individuals are ex¬ 
posed to accidental, destructive influences, others escape them. The plurality is 
thus preserved. But still, or rather from the same reasons which cause the single 
individual to perish, even species die away. Thus the Dronte has disappeared, 
thus the Irish gigantic deer, thus evi n now-a days many animal species disappear 
in consequence of man’s persecution and of the evermore extending civilization 
from regions where they once or even a short time ago still existed in great 
numbers, as, e. g. the seal from some inlands ; and in time will disappear entirely 
from the earth. 

(19) Compare in regard to this matter the expressions of Socrates in Xen¬ 
ophon’s writings as to oracles. 

(20) The Christians pray likewise to their God for rain as the Greeks^ did to 
Jove, and believe lhat they are heard with such prayers. “There was,” says 
Luther, in his table-discourses, “ a great drought, as it had not rained for a long 
time, and the grain in the field began to dry up when Dr. M. L. prayed continu¬ 
ally and said finally with heavy sighs: O, Lord, pray regard our petition in behalf 

of thy promise.I know that we cry to thee and s gh desirously; why dost 

thou not hear us ? And the very next night came a very fine fruitful rain.” 

(21) It is true the omission of the limits has increase and change for its conse¬ 
quences ; but it does not destroy the essential identity. 

(22) The definition ol polytheism generally and without further explanation as 
natural religion, holds good only relatively and comparatively. 

(23) Arbitrariness in the use of words is unbounded. But still no words are 
used so arbitrarily, nor taken in so contradictory significations as the words God 
and religion. Whence this arbitrariness and confusion? Because people from 
reverence or from fear to contradict opinions sanctioned by age, retain the old 
names (for only the name , the appearance, rules the world , even the world of believers 
in God), although they connect entirely different ideas with them which have been 
gained only in the course of time. Thus it was in regard to the Grecian Gods 
which in the course of lime received the most contradictory significations; thus 
in regard to the Christian God, Atheism calling itself theism is the religion, 
anti-Christianity calling itself Christianity is the true Christianity of the present 
day.— Mundus vult decipi. 

(24) A being therefore which is only a philosophical principle, and conse¬ 
quently only an object of philosophy, but not of religion, of worship, of prayer, 
of the heart; a being that does not accomplish any wishes, nor hear any prayers, 
is only a nominal God, but not a God in reality. 

(25) While therefore in the paradise of Christian phantasms man could not 
die and would not die if he had not sinned, with the Greeks man died, even in the 
blissful age of Kronos, but as easily as if he fell asleep. In this idea the natural 
wish of man is realized. Man does not wish for immortal life; he only wishes 
for a long life of physical and mental health and a painless death agreeable to Na¬ 
ture. To resign the belief in immortality requires nothing less than an inhuman 
Stoic resignation • it requires nothing but to be convinced that the articles of 
the Christian cried are founded only upon supernatHralistic, iantastic wishes, 
and to return to the simple real nature of man. 






THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 


75 




(26) Luther e.g. Bays: ‘‘But where God is (i.e. in heaven) there must also be all 
good things which even we may possibly wish for.’’ Thus in the Koran, accord* 
ing to Savary’s translation it is said of the inhabitants of Paradise : “ Tout leurs 
desirs 8eront combles .” (All their wishes will be accomplished.) Only their 
wishes are of a different kind. 

(27) The will however, especially in the sense of the moralists, does not consti¬ 
tute the specific essence of religion ; because what I can attain by my will, for 
that I need no Gods. To make morals the essential cause of religion is to retain 
the name of religion, but to drop its essence. One can be moral without God, but 
happy—in the supernaturalistic, Christian sense of the word—one cannot be 
without God; for happiness in this sense lies beyond the limits and the power 
of Nature and mankind, it therefore presupposes for its realization a supernatural 
being which is and can do, what is impossible to Nature and mankind. If Kant 
therefore made morals the essence of religion, he was in the same or at least a 
similar relation to Christian religion as Aristotle to the Greek religion, when the 
latter made theory the essence of the Gods. As little as a God who is only a spec¬ 
ulative being, nothing but intellect, still is a God , so little a merely moral being 
or a “ personified law of morals ” is still a God. It is true, Jove already is also 
a philosopher, when he looks smilingly down from Olympus upon the struggles of 
the Gods, but he is still infinitely more; certainly also the Christian God is a 
moral being, but still infinitely more ; morals are onlv the condition of happiness. 
The true idea which is at the bottom of Christian happiness, especially in contrast 
to philosophic heathenism, is however no other than the one, that true happi¬ 
ness can be found only in the gratification of man's whole nature, for which reason 
Christianity admits also the body, the flesh, to the participation in the divinity 
or what iB the same thing, in the enjoyment of happiness. But the development 
of this thought does not belong here, it belongs to the “ Essence of Christianity J T 



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